Juvenile hawksbill residency and habitat use within a Caribbean marine protected area

Th Selby,Z Hillis-Starr,Cg Pollock,Km Hart,Mk Oli,Bj Smith

doi:10.3354/esr00975

Abstract

Juvenile hawksbill residency and habitat use within a Caribbean marine protected area

Highlights

Coastal marine ecosystems across the globe are threatened by direct and indirect anthropogenic influences (Halpern et al 2015)
Higher-resolution spatial and temporal habitat-use data provide more power to detect anomalous changes in the environment through shifts in behavior. This is especially important in the highly connected and dynamic marine environment, where adverse anthropogenic threats far from an marine protected areas (MPAs) boundary, such as an oil spill, or regionally imposed threats, such as climate change, can have detrimental effects on those areas protected by the MPA over time. Using this fixed passive acoustic array of receivers, we investigated the residency and habitat-use trends of juvenile hawksbills captured within the protected waters of Buck Island Reef National Monument (BIRNM)
Our results help quantify the long-term habitat use by juvenile hawksbills within a coastal Caribbean protected area. Understanding how these individuals use BIRNM is critical to evaluating the efficacy of current management practices, and provides information for comparison with future cohorts to understand potential shifts in behavior as a result of anthropogenic stressors on the environment there

Summary

Introduction

Coastal marine ecosystems across the globe are threatened by direct and indirect anthropogenic influences (Halpern et al 2015). Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become a popular conservation tool to mitigate detrimental influences within designated areas (Keller et al 2009). Distributed globally throughout the tropics, hawksbill sea turtles Eretmochelys imbricata are one such species of marine megafauna shown to directly impact coral reef ecosystems through their consumption of macroalgae and sponges (Meylan 1988, León & Bjorndal 2002, Gaos et al 2012, Bell 2013). Habitat degradation, direct take, and incidental bycatch over the past century have greatly reduced global hawksbill populations, causing the IUCN to list the species as Critically Endangered (Mortimer & Donnelly 2008). Similar to other marine turtle species, hawksbills exhibit ontogenetic shifts over long lifespans wherein they use both pelagic and coastal environments (Musick & Limpus 1997, Godley et al 2008). The juvenile developmental stage offers a practical opportunity to protect hawksbills using MPAs

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Conclusion