Heart rate and swimming activity as indicators of post-surgical recovery time of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar)

Background Fish telemetry using electronic transmitter or data storage tags has become a common method for studying free-swimming fish both in the wild and in aquaculture. However, fish used in telemetry studies must be handled, anaesthetised and often subjected to surgical procedures to be equipped with tags, processes that will shift the fish from their normal physiological and behavioural states. In many projects, information is needed on when the fish has recovered after handling and tagging so that only the data recorded after the fish has fully recovered are used in analyses. We aimed to establish recovery times of adult Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) after an intraperitoneal tagging procedure featuring handling, anaesthesia and surgery. Results Based on ECG and accelerometer data collected with telemetry from nine individual Atlantic salmon during the first period after tagging, we found that heart rate was initially elevated in all fish and that it took an average of ≈ 4 days and a maximum of 6 days for heart rate to return to an assumed baseline level. One activity tag showed no consistent decline in activity, and two others did not show strong evidence of complete recovery by the end of the experiment: baseline levels of the remaining tags were on average reached after ≈ 3.3 days. Conclusion Our findings showed that the Atlantic salmon used in this study required an average of ≈ 4 days, with a maximum interval of 6 days, of recovery after tagging before tag data could be considered valid. Moreover, the differences between recovery times for heart rate and activity imply that recovery time recommendations should be developed based on a combination of indicators and not just on e.g. behavioural observations. © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/publi cdoma in/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.