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Efficiency of aquatic PIT-tag telemetry, a powerful tool to improve monitoring and detection of marked individuals in pond environments

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Abstract

Identifying and tracking individuals across time are a prerequisite to uncover key traits of their ecology and behavior. However, obtaining fine-grain individual data at multiple locations, especially in aquatic environments, is challenging due to trade-offs between time constraints and detection probabilities. Aquatic telemetry of passive integrated transponder (PIT)-tagged organisms has been proposed to cope with detectability issues, but its efficiency has not been tested in stagnant waters. This technology was evaluated in ponds by monitoring marsh frogs (Pelophylax ridibundus). Multivariate survival models were fitted to quantify the success of detection rates over detection times and across ponds characterized by different habitat features. An average detection rate of 81% was obtained in less than 18 min on average, whereas a maximum detection rate was achieved in almost a quarter of the surveys. The detection rates were lower in the deeper and larger ponds but increasing detection times improved detection probabilities. Altogether, these results show that PIT-tag telemetry is a powerful tool to survey aquatic organisms, such as pond-breeding amphibians. The generalization of the use of this monitoring technique in ponds can therefore encompass fine-grain analyses over numerous sites and fill the gap between studies at local and landscape scales.

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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Pinto, L. Lorrain, P. Levionnois, and L. Seger for their help in the field, the land owners and municipalities for allowing access to their ponds, U. Sinsch and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments, and Direction Régionale de l’Environnement, de l’Aménagement et du Logement (DREAL Hérault) for permitting the surveys. C. Duret benefited of an Erasmus Plus grant and M. Denoël is a Research Director of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS.

Funding

This work was supported by a PDR Grant Number T.0070.19 of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS.

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  1. Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Amphibians (LECA), Freshwater and OCeanic Science Unit of reSearch (FOCUS), University of Liège, 4020, Liege, Belgium

    Clément Duret, Fabien Pille & Mathieu Denoël

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CD contributed to conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, writing and preparation of original draft, and writing, reviewing, & editing of the manuscript. FP contributed to data curation, investigation, methodology, and writing, reviewing, & editing of the manuscript. MD contributed to conceptualization, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, supervision, validation, writing and preparation of original draft, and writing, reviewing, & editing of the manuscript.

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Duret, C., Pille, F. & Denoël, M. Efficiency of aquatic PIT-tag telemetry, a powerful tool to improve monitoring and detection of marked individuals in pond environments. Hydrobiologia 849, 2609–2619 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-022-04888-8

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