Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

ResearcherID

G-4080-2013

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

PLoS One

ISSN

1932-6203

Publication Date

3-18-2013

Keywords

Reefs, Wildlife, Cayman Islands, Marine ecosystems, Lagoons, Animal behavior, Boats, Foraging

Abstract

Southern stingrays, Dasyatis americana, have been provided supplemental food in ecotourism operations at Stingray City Sandbar (SCS), Grand Cayman since 1986, with this site becoming one of the world’s most famous and heavily visited marine wildlife interaction venues. Given expansion of marine wildlife interactive tourism worldwide, there are questions about the effects of such activities on the focal species and their ecosystems. We used a combination of acoustic telemetry and tag-recapture efforts to test the hypothesis that human-sourced supplemental feeding has altered stingray activity patterns and habitat use at SCS relative to wild animals at control sites. Secondarily, we also qualitatively estimated the population size of stingrays supporting this major ecotourism venue. Tag-recapture data indicated that a population of at least 164 stingrays, over 80% female, utilized the small area at SCS for prolonged periods of time. Examination of comparative movements of mature female stingrays at SCS and control sites revealed strong differences between the two groups: The fed animals demonstrated a notable inversion of diel activity, being constantly active during the day with little movement at night compared to the nocturnally active wild stingrays; The fed stingrays utilized significantly (p

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0059235

Volume

8

Issue

3 e59235

First Page

1

Last Page

11

Comments

©2013 Corcoran et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Peer Reviewed

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