Abstract
Tourism represents an important opportunity to provide sustainable funding for many ecosystems, including marine systems. Tourism that is reliant on aggregating predator species in a specific area using food provisioning raises questions about the long-term ecological impacts to the ecosystem at large? Here, using opportunistically collected video footage, we document that 61 different species of fish across 16 families are consuming tuna flesh at two separate shark dive tourism operations in the Republic of Fiji. Of these fish, we have resolved 55 to species level. Notably, 35 (63%) of the identified species we observed consuming tuna flesh were from ostensibly non-piscivorous fishes, including four Acanthuridae species, a group primarily recognized as browsers or grazers of algae and epibenthic detritus. Our results indicate that shark diving is having a direct impact on species other than sharks and that many species are facultatively expanding their trophic niches to accommodate the hyperabundance of resources provided by ecotourism.
Highlights
Tourism has been long suggested as a mechanism for supporting sustainable use of protected ecosystems, in marine areas [1]
One prominent question regarding this activity is: what are the impacts of dive tourism on the local ecology? This question becomes pertinent in sites where food is used to help aggregate charismatic megafauna for tourists
Functional groups are a useful concept in ecology, the rigidly defined dietary boundaries for different functional groups do not adequately acknowledge the potential for plasticity that many species exhibit under certain circumstances
Summary
Tourism has been long suggested as a mechanism for supporting sustainable use of protected ecosystems, in marine areas [1]. One form of ecotourism that has become popular in the last decade is the use of large Elasmobranches (sharks and rays) as foci for dive tourism [2,3,4,5]. One prominent question regarding this activity is: what are the impacts of dive tourism on the local ecology? Studies have shown changes in diversity and mean trophic level in shark feeding in some areas, [4] and a reduction in benthic diversity in others [6]. A parallel question remains regarding population-level impacts of this trophic supplementation: what, if any, changes in trophic functional groups occur during these predictably occurring, and frequent, times of trophic hyperabundance?.
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