Abstract

Moulting, growth and retention of externally attached acoustic tags were studied in tenMediterranean slipper lobsters, Scyllarides latus (Latreille, 1802). Animals were kept in acage at 20 m depth in Faial Island, Azores, over a period of nine months. No negativeeffects of tag attachment on moult or behaviour were detected, but a negative effect on growth cannot be excluded. Moulting was correlated with ambient water temperature and resulted in an increase of approximately 7% in mean size and 17% in mean weight. The results demonstrate that the use of externally attached acoustic transmitters in this species is adequate for medium-term movement studies but not for longer-term annual studies, due to the rate of molting.