Understanding the mechanisms driving the movement behaviors of animals can inform our expectations of how animals will respond to changing resource phenology and distributions as predicted under climate change. Across both marine and terrestrial systems, animals should benefit from increased resource gain by matching their movements in space and time to the availability of resources (4, 7). Thus, the movement of an animal should be fined-tuned to its resource landscape, and different resource landscapes should favor different movement mechanisms, such as random search, memory, and taxis (i.e., gradient tracking) (23). Animals likely use a mixture of different movement mechanisms to interact with their environment. Here, we demonstrate that resource tracking in highly dynamic environments can be enhanced by long-term memory of highly productive and relatively stable foraging sites. Memory is hypothesized to be favored in organisms that are long-lived, which can have extended periods of learning, and in resource landscapes that are heterogeneous and predictable (16). Our findings are consistent with these predictions and, in addition, provide a test of the green wave hypothesis in a marine system.