Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-18-2013
Publication Title
PLoS One
Keywords
Reefs, Wildlife, Cayman Islands, Marine ecosystems, Lagoons, Animal behavior, Boats, Foraging
ISSN
1932-6203
Volume
8
Issue/No.
3 e59235
First Page
1
Last Page
11
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
NSUWorks Citation
Mark John Corcoran, Bradley M. Wetherbee, Mahmood S. Shivji, Matthew Potenski, Demian D. Chapman, and Guy Harvey. 2013. Supplemental Feeding for Ecotourism Reverses Diel Activity and Alters Movement Patterns and Spatial Distribution of the Southern Stingray, Dasyatis americana .PLoS One , (3 e59235) : 1 -11. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/356.
ResearcherID
G-4080-2013
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0059235
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.