Tourism in the Cayman Islands may be domesticating stingrays.
A new study published Monday in the journal “PLOS ONE” focuses on how “interactive ecotourism” affects marine wildlife, and whether it encourages marine life to rely on humans for food.
The researchers looked at southern stingrays at Stingray City, a sandbar in the Cayman Islands, where visitors pet, feed and swim with the creatures. As many as one million tourists visit the sandbar every year, so if ecotourism has any effect on marine life, it should be seen here.
“Measuring the impact is important because there’s a lot of interest in creating more of these interactive ecotourism operations, but we know little about the life histories of the animals involved or how they might change,” Guy Harvey told Science Daily. Harvey is a researcher at Nova Southeastern University’s research institute that shares his name and co-author of the study.
The research found that the rays of Stingray City behave very differently from their wild counterparts, who do not enjoy human contact.
“We saw some very clear and very prominent behavioral changes, and were surprised by how these large animals had essentially become homebodies in a tiny area,” said Mahmood Shivji, who led the study and is director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute and an NSU Oceanographic Center professor.
Stingrays are normally active at night, when they forage for food. They are also solitary creatures, and rarely interact with other rays. But the researchers found the Stingray City stingrays began feeding during the day, when tourists were feeding them, and in very close proximity to one another. The study noted at least 164 stingrays bunched together in an area of about a quarter square mile at Stingray City.
“There are likely to be some health costs that come with these behavioral changes, and they could be detrimental to the animals’ well-being in the long term,” Shivji said.
The stingrays are big business in the Cayman Islands, and just one ray in Stingray City brings in as much as $500,000 in tourist money every year. The Harvey team will continue to study the animals and the impact tourism has on their behaviors.
“Right now, these animals have no protection at all,” Harvey said. “Without more studies like these, we won’t know what that means for the wildlife or if we need to take action. It’s unclear how much of the stingray’s daily diet comes from tourism-provided food, but the good news is we have seen the animals forage when tourists are absent suggesting that these animals are not completely dependent on these handouts.”
