La Jolla to Long Beach Corridor is an important movement area for Shovelnose Guitarfish.

Shovelnose Guitarfish regularly use this area to seasonally move among coastal locations (Gong et al. 2023). Twelve Shovelnose Guitarfish were tagged with acoustic transmitters in La Jolla in July–August of 2014, 2016, and 2017 and tracked for a six-year period between 2014–2020. Ten of these were mature females ranging from 123–147 cm total length (TL), and two individuals were mature males of 124 and 135 cm TL. The size-at-maturity for this species is 87–110 cm TL (Last et al. 2016). La Jolla is a boreal summer aggregation site for Shovelnose Guitarfish, as well as for other shark and ray species (Nosal et al. 2013, 2014). Almost all tracked Shovelnose Guitarfish (11 of 12 individuals) showed seasonal northward movements between La Jolla (in summer) to Long Beach (in winter). Four individuals showed this migration pattern consistently for at least three consecutive years after tagging. Some individuals continued further north past Long Beach, but the regular and predictable movements were limited to this area. Movements were driven mostly by photoperiod (Gong et al. 2023). Reproduction is a likely reason for the annual northward migration in winter and return movement to La Jolla in summer, given the species’ annual reproductive cycle (Márquez-Farías 2007; Gong et al. 2023), with mating and birthing likely happening within this movement corridor. A suspected Shovelnose Guitarfish nursery area has been studied between Huntington Beach and Long Beach, at the northern extent of the area, including the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve (Farrugia et al. 2011). There, scientific fishing surveys, comprising 144 beach seines and 218 longline sets between 2008–2009, captured 269 Shovelnose Guitarfish. Almost all (96%) were juveniles, and captures throughout the year, as well as passive acoustic telemetry of 23 individuals, suggest that juveniles have high site fidelity and do not seasonally migrate like the adults do (Farrugia et al. 2011). Combined, the data show that adult Shovelnose Guitarfish seasonally migrate through this area, potentially for reproductive purposes (Gong et al. 2023). This is the only area with evidence of regular movements for this range-restricted species that is distributed only in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (LME), the Gulf of California LME, and marginally in the Pacific Central-American Coast LME (Farrugia et al. 2016).