Whale shark economics: a valuation of wildlife tourism in South Ari Atoll, Maldives.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cagua EF
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4137667 | biostudies-literature | 2014
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The whale shark (Rhincodon typus) is an endangered species with a declining global population. The South Ari Atoll Marine Protected Area (SAMPA), Maldives, is one of few locations globally where year-long residency of individuals occurs. This SAMPA aggregation appears to consist almost exclusively of immature males. Due to its year-round residency, this local aggregation is subjected to a high degree of tourism pressure. This ecotourism contributes to the high level of interest and protection offered to whale sharks by the local community. Unfortunately, if regulations are not followed or enforced, tourism can bring with it major stressors, such as accidental injuries. We used POPAN capture-mark-recapture models and lagged identification rate analysis to assess the effect of major injuries on whale shark residency within SAMPA. Injuries may be obtained outside SAMPA. We found individuals with major injuries had a higher apparent survival in the area than those without. Lagged identification rates also demonstrated that sharks with major injuries are more likely to return to the area. We suggest that major injuries result in sharks prolonging their time in the developmental habitat. These findings have implications for individual fitness and the population viability of this endangered species. We propose targeted conservation strategies be considered to protect sharks from further injury. Based on the presented spatio-temporal distributions of sharks, and current local knowledge of sighting patterns, speed limit zones and propeller-exclusion zones should be implemented and enforced. If carried out alongside tourist education, these measures will contribute to the protection of whale sharks within SAMPA and beyond. Furthermore, our results can aid research direction, alongside regulation and enforcement development, at similar sites worldwide.
| S-EPMC7806644 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The whale shark is the world's largest fish that forms predictable aggregations across its range, many of which support tourism industries. The largest non-captive provisioned whale shark destination globally is at Oslob, Philippines, where more than 500 000 tourists visit yearly. There, the sharks are provisioned daily, year-round, allowing the human-shark interaction in nearshore waters. We used in-water behavioural observations of whale sharks between 2015 and 2017 to understand the relationship between external stimuli and shark behaviour, whether frequency of visits at the site can act as a predictor of behaviour, and the tourist compliance to the code of conduct. Mixed effects models revealed that the number of previous visits at the site was a strong predictor of whale shark behaviour, and that provisioned sharks were less likely to exhibit avoidance. Compliance was poor, with 93% of surveys having people less than 2 m from the animal, highlighting overcrowding of whale sharks at Oslob. Given the behavioural implications to whale sharks highlighted here and the local community's reliance on the tourism industry, it is imperative to improve management strategies to increase tourist compliance and strive for sustainable tourism practices.
| S-EPMC7813242 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper reviews concepts and methods for the economic valuation of nature in the context of wildlife conservation and questions them in light of alternative approaches based on deliberation. Economic valuations have been used to set priorities, consider opportunity costs, assess co-benefits of conservation, support the case for conservation in public awareness and advocacy, and drive novel schemes to change incentives. We discuss the foundational principles of mainstream economic valuation in terms of its assumptions about values, markets, and human behaviour; propose a list of valuation studies in relation to wildlife protection; and explain the methods used. We then review critiques of these approaches focusing on the narrow way in which economics conceives of values, and institutional, power, and equity concerns. Finally, we complement conventional approaches commonly used for wildlife valuation with two forms of deliberative valuation: deliberated preferences and deliberative democratic monetary valuation. These are discussed in terms of their potential to address the drawbacks of mainstream economics and to realise the potential of valuation in bridging conservation of nature for its own sake and its important contributions to human well-being.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10344-023-01658-2.
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Project description:Human-wildlife conflict is a barrier to achieving sustainable biodiversity conservation and community development in protected areas. Tourism is often regarded as a tool to mitigate such conflict. However, existing studies have mainly adopted a socio-economic perspective to examine the benefits of tourism for communities, neglecting the ecological effects of tourism. This case study of macaque tourism on a peninsula in China illustrates that tourism can escalate rather than mitigate human-wildlife conflict. Fifty-three stakeholders were interviewed and secondary data were collected to understand the development of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) tourism and community-macaque conflict. The results show that food provision and tourist-macaque interactions rapidly increased the macaques' population, habituation, and aggressive behaviors, which led them to invade the surrounding community more often and exacerbated human-macaque conflict. Meanwhile, low community participation in tourism generated few benefits for residents and did not help alter residents' hostile attitudes towards the macaques. Local residents gradually retreated from agriculture as the macaques became more intrusive. A holistic approach to evaluating the role of wildlife tourism in resolving community-wildlife conflict is proposed and practical suggestions for alleviating such conflict are given.
| S-EPMC8150641 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In a search for biomarkers of health in whale sharks and as exploration of metabolomics as a modern tool for understanding animal physiology, the metabolite composition of serum in six whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) from an aquarium collection was explored using (1)H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and direct analysis in real time (DART) mass spectrometry (MS). Principal components analysis (PCA) of spectral data showed that individual animals could be resolved based on the metabolite composition of their serum and that two unhealthy individuals could be discriminated from the remaining healthy animals. The major difference between healthy and unhealthy individuals was the concentration of homarine, here reported for the first time in an elasmobranch, which was present at substantially lower concentrations in unhealthy whale sharks, suggesting that this metabolite may be a useful biomarker of health status in this species. The function(s) of homarine in sharks remain uncertain but it likely plays a significant role as an osmolyte. The presence of trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), another well-known protective osmolyte of elasmobranchs, at 0.1-0.3 mol L(-1) was also confirmed using both NMR and MS. Twenty-three additional potential biomarkers were identified based on significant differences in the frequency of their occurrence between samples from healthy and unhealthy animals, as detected by DART MS. Overall, NMR and MS provided complementary data that showed that metabolomics is a useful approach for biomarker prospecting in poorly studied species like elasmobranchs.
| S-EPMC3499553 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Wildlife consumption can be viewed as an ecosystem provisioning service (the production of a material good through ecological functioning) because of wildlife's ability to persist under sustainable levels of harvest. We used the case of wildlife harvest and consumption in northeastern Madagascar to identify the distribution of these services to local households and communities to further our understanding of local reliance on natural resources. We inferred these benefits from demand curves built with data on wildlife sales transactions. On average, the value of wildlife provisioning represented 57% of annual household cash income in local communities from the Makira Natural Park and Masoala National Park, and harvested areas produced an economic return of U.S.$0.42 ha(-1) · year(-1). Variability in value of harvested wildlife was high among communities and households with an approximate 2 orders of magnitude difference in the proportional value of wildlife to household income. The imputed price of harvested wildlife and its consumption were strongly associated (p< 0.001), and increases in price led to reduced harvest for consumption. Heightened monitoring and enforcement of hunting could increase the costs of harvesting and thus elevate the price and reduce consumption of wildlife. Increased enforcement would therefore be beneficial to biodiversity conservation but could limit local people's food supply. Specifically, our results provide an estimate of the cost of offsetting economic losses to local populations from the enforcement of conservation policies. By explicitly estimating the welfare effects of consumed wildlife, our results may inform targeted interventions by public health and development specialists as they allocate sparse funds to support regions, households, or individuals most vulnerable to changes in access to wildlife.
| S-EPMC4151980 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Anthropogenic activities are dramatically changing marine ecosystems. Wildlife tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry and has the potential to modify the natural environment and behaviour of the species it targets. Here, we used a novel method to assess the effects of wildlife tourism on the activity of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). High frequency three-axis acceleration loggers were deployed on ten white sharks for a total of ~9 days. A combination of multivariate and univariate analysis revealed that the increased number of strong accelerations and vertical movements when sharks are interacting with cage-diving operators result in an overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA) ~61% higher compared with other times when sharks are present in the area where cage-diving occurs. Since ODBA is considered a proxy of metabolic rate, interacting with cage-divers is probably more costly than are normal behaviours of white sharks at the Neptune Islands. However, the overall impact of cage-diving might be small if interactions with individual sharks are infrequent. This study suggests wildlife tourism changes the instantaneous activity levels of white sharks, and calls for an understanding of the frequency of shark-tourism interactions to appreciate the net impact of ecotourism on this species' fitness.
| S-EPMC5912080 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The present study uses a review of the literature and the views of tourism and management professors and experts in order to the identification of organizational intelligence elements in tourism management (STO) for the first time. The census method was used to determine the research sample and the Delphi technique was used to design the questionnaire. Construct divergence was then used to determine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. The final results indicated that providing e-services for tourists had the greatest impact on the development of STO (loading factor: 0.677). Moreover, New Tourism Marketing Methods (NTMM) had the least effect on the development of STO (loading factor: 0.431). Overall, the most important achievement of the present research is introducing the concept of STO in tourism management.
| S-EPMC6579854 | biostudies-other
Project description:Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes) are fundamental for understanding vertebrate evolution, yet their genomes are understudied. We report long-read sequencing of the whale shark genome to generate the best gapless chondrichthyan genome assembly yet with higher contig contiguity than all other cartilaginous fish genomes, and studied vertebrate genomic evolution of ancestral gene families, immunity, and gigantism. We found a major increase in gene families at the origin of gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates) independent of their genome duplication. We studied vertebrate pathogen recognition receptors (PRRs), which are key in initiating innate immune defense, and found diverse patterns of gene family evolution, demonstrating that adaptive immunity in gnathostomes did not fully displace germline-encoded PRR innovation. We also discovered a new toll-like receptor (TLR29) and three NOD1 copies in the whale shark. We found chondrichthyan and giant vertebrate genomes had decreased substitution rates compared to other vertebrates, but gene family expansion rates varied among vertebrate giants, suggesting substitution and expansion rates of gene families are decoupled in vertebrate genomes. Finally, we found gene families that shifted in expansion rate in vertebrate giants were enriched for human cancer-related genes, consistent with gigantism requiring adaptations to suppress cancer.
| S-EPMC8455134 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe whale shark (Rhincodon typus) is known to aggregate in a number of coastal locations globally, however what causes these aggregations to form where they do is largely unknown. This study examines whether bathymetry is an important driver of coastal aggregation locations for R. typus through bathymetry's effect on primary productivity and prey availability. This is a global study taking into account all coastal areas within R. typus' range.MethodsR. typus aggregation locations were identified through an extensive literature review. Global bathymetric data were compared at R. typus aggregation locations and a large random selection of non-aggregation areas. Generalised linear models were used to assess which bathymetric characteristic had the biggest influence on aggregation presence.ResultsAggregation sites were significantly shallower than non-aggregation sites and in closer proximity to deep water (the mesopelagic zone) by two orders of magnitude. Slope at aggregation sites was significantly steeper than non-aggregation sites. These three bathymetric variables were shown to have the biggest association with aggregation sites, with up to 88% of deviation explained by the GLMs.DiscussionThe three key bathymetric characteristics similar at the aggregation sites are known to induce upwelling events, increase primary productivity and consequently attract numerous other filter feeding species. The location of aggregation sites in these key areas can be attributed to this increased prey availability, thought to be the main reason R. typus aggregations occur, extensively outlined in the literature. The proximity of aggregations to shallow areas such as reefs could also be an important factor why whale sharks thermoregulate after deep dives to feed. These findings increase our understanding of whale shark behaviour and may help guide the identification and conservation of further aggregation sites.
| S-EPMC5995094 | biostudies-literature