On the relevance of animal behavior to the management and conservation of fishes and fisheries

There are many syntheses on the role of animal behavior in understanding and mitigating conservation threats for wildlife. That body of work has inspired the development of a new discipline called conservation behavior. Yet, the majority of those synthetic papers focus on non-fish taxa such as birds and mammals. Many fish populations are subject to intensive exploitation and management and for decades researchers have used concepts and knowledge from animal behavior to support management and conservation actions. Dr. David L. G. Noakes is an influential ethologist who did much foundational work related to illustrating how behavior was relevant to the management and conservation of wild fish. We pay tribute to the late Dr. Noakes by summarizing the relevance of animal behavior to fisheries management and conservation. To do so, we first consider what behavior has revealed about how fish respond to key threats such as habitat alteration and loss, invasive species, climate change, pollution, and exploitation. We then consider how behavior has informed the application of common management interventions such as protected areas and spatial planning, stock enhancement, and restoration of habitat and connectivity. Our synthesis focuses on the totality of the field but includes reflections on the specific contributions of Dr. Noakes. Themes emerging from his approach include the value of fundamental research, management-scale experiments, and bridging behavior, physiology, and ecology. Animal behavior plays a key role in understanding and mitigating threats to wild fish populations and will become more important with the increasing pressures facing aquatic ecosystems. Fortunately, the toolbox for studying behavior is expanding, with technological and analytical advances revolutionizing our understanding of wild fish and generating new knowledge for fisheries managers and conservation practitioners

Sentiment analysis as a measure of conservation culture in scientific literature

Culturomics is emerging as an important field within science, a way to measure attitudes and beliefs and their dynamics across time and space via quantitative analysis of digitized data from literature, news, film, social media, and more. Sentiment analysis is an emerging tool for culturomics that, within the last decade, has provided a means to quantify the polarity of attitudes expressed within various media. Conservation science is a crisis discipline and one in which accurate and effective communication are paramount to success. We investigated how conservation scientists communicate their findings through one of their primary media: scientific journal articles. We analysed 15,001 abstracts from papers published in conservation‐focused journals published in the last 20 years, 1998–2017. Papers were categorized by year, focal taxa, and their conservation status; the mean sentiment scores were then extracted from the abstract using four lexicons (Jockers‐Rinker, NRC, Bing et al., and AFINN). We found no annual trend in the sentiment scores of papers across conservation literature but analysis of absolute values suggested increasing polarization of language over time (i.e. less neutral). We also observed a trend towards increasing negativity along the spectrum of IUCN Red List categories (i.e. from Least Concern to Critically Endangered to Extinct), though this relationship was not significant. There were some clear differences in the sentiments with which research on different taxa were reported, however. For example, abstracts mentioning lobe finned fishes tended to have high sentiment scores, which we hypothesize may be related to the rediscovery of the coelacanth driving a positive narrative. Contrastingly, abstracts mentioning elasmobranchs had low scores, reflecting the negative sentiment score associated with the word “sharks”. Sentiment analysis is an exciting frontier with applications in science and we suggest a new science‐based lexicon be developed for applying this tool to conservation