A fish’s behaviors describe what it is biologically. When you know what it eats at different life stages, what eats it, where it resides at various ages and at different times during the day and year, how it reacts to other species, how it reacts to conspecifics, and its reproductive behaviors, you know its life history. This is critical in conservation management, because knowing a fish’s behaviors will tell you the bottlenecks that are hindering survival and reproduction, and that will tell you the environmental fixes that are needed for recovery. Raising fish in traditional barren fish culture units with industrial-type management produces behaviorally-naïve fish with mal-adaptive behaviors, which adversely affects post-augmentation survival. The effect that culture has on three key behaviors is discussed: reproduction, predator avoidance, and feeding/foraging. The spawning protocol that is used to produce the fish that will be cultured can alter reproductive behaviors, particularly time of spawning which can, in turn, affect survival in subsequent generations. While spawning is not an aspect of conservation aquaculture per se, the genetic changes and their subsequent impacts on fitness that can be produced by your spawning protocol shows why you must consider genetics and fitness in all aspects of management when producing fish for augmentation. Traditional, intensive fish culture management produces fish that have poor foraging behaviors and that do not know how to avoid predators, which explains why they have high post-augmentation mortality. To improve post-augmentation survival, you need to raise fish in mesocosms that resemble the wild environment and use naturalized, extensive management; do not feed fish, but make them learn how to forage and stock predators so that they are not predator-naïve. Producing fish for aquaculture-assisted fisheries programs that do not have post-augmentation mal-adaptive behaviors is accomplished by using conservation aquaculture.