Columbia University, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, New York, NY United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Aug 29;14(8):e0221781. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221781. eCollection 2019.
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.
旅游业是为许多生态系统(包括海洋系统)提供可持续资金的重要机会。依赖于在特定区域聚集捕食者物种并用食物供应来吸引游客的旅游业,引发了对整个生态系统的长期生态影响的质疑。在这里,我们利用偶然收集的视频片段,记录了斐济共和国的两个鲨鱼潜水旅游业务中,有 61 种不同的鱼类(属于 16 个科)正在食用金枪鱼的肉。在这些鱼类中,我们已经将 55 种确定到物种水平。值得注意的是,我们观察到有 35 种(占 63%)食用金枪鱼肉的鱼类来自表面上非肉食性的鱼类,包括 4 种刺尾鱼科鱼类,这一组主要被认为是藻类和附着碎屑的食草动物或掠食者。我们的结果表明,鲨鱼潜水活动正在对鲨鱼以外的物种产生直接影响,而且许多物种正在通过扩大其营养生态位来适应生态旅游提供的丰富资源。