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Feeding the world's largest fish: highly variable whale shark residency patterns at a provisioning site in the Philippines.

ABSTRACT: Provisioning wildlife for tourism is a controversial yet widespread practice. We analysed the residency patterns of juvenile whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) in Oslob, Philippines, where provisioning has facilitated a large shark-watching operation since 2011. We identified 208 individual sharks over three years, with an average of 18.6 (s.d.?=?7.8, range?=?6-43) individuals sighted per week. Weekly shark abundance varied seasonally and peak-season abundance (approx. May-November) increased across years. Whale sharks displayed diverse individual site visitation patterns ranging from a single visit to sporadic visits, seasonal residency and year-round residency. Nine individuals became year-round residents, which represents a clear response to provisioning. The timing of the seasonal peak at Oslob did not align with known non-provisioned seasonal aggregations elsewhere in the Philippines, which could suggest that seasonal residents at Oslob exploit this food source when prey availability at alternative sites is low. Since prolonged residency equates to less time foraging naturally, provisioning could influence foraging success, alter distributions and lead to dependency in later life stages. Such impacts must be carefully weighed against the benefits of provisioning (i.e. tourism revenue in a remote community) to facilitate informed management decisions.

SUBMITTER: Thomson JA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5627090 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Feeding the world's largest fish: highly variable whale shark residency patterns at a provisioning site in the Philippines.

Thomson Jordan A JA Araujo Gonzalo G Labaja Jessica J McCoy Emer E Murray Ryan R Ponzo Alessandro A

Royal Society open science 20170927 9

Provisioning wildlife for tourism is a controversial yet widespread practice. We analysed the residency patterns of juvenile whale sharks (<i>Rhincodon typus</i>) in Oslob, Philippines, where provisioning has facilitated a large shark-watching operation since 2011. We identified 208 individual sharks over three years, with an average of 18.6 (s.d. = 7.8, range = 6-43) individuals sighted per week. Weekly shark abundance varied seasonally and peak-season abundance (approx. May-November) increased ...[more]

PMID: 28989750

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Project description:BACKGROUND:The whale shark (Rhincodon typus) has by far the largest body size of any elasmobranch (shark or ray) species. Therefore, it is also the largest extant species of the paraphyletic assemblage commonly referred to as fishes. As both a phenotypic extreme and a member of the group Chondrichthyes - the sister group to the remaining gnathostomes, which includes all tetrapods and therefore also humans - its genome is of substantial comparative interest. Whale sharks are also listed as an endangered species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of threatened species and are of growing popularity as both a target of ecotourism and as a charismatic conservation ambassador for the pelagic ecosystem. A genome map for this species would aid in defining effective conservation units and understanding global population structure. RESULTS:We characterised the nuclear genome of the whale shark using next generation sequencing (454, Illumina) and de novo assembly and annotation methods, based on material collected from the Georgia Aquarium. The data set consisted of 878,654,233 reads, which yielded a draft assembly of 1,213,200 contigs and 997,976 scaffolds. The estimated genome size was 3.44Gb. As expected, the proteome of the whale shark was most closely related to the only other complete genome of a cartilaginous fish, the holocephalan elephant shark. The whale shark contained a novel Toll-like-receptor (TLR) protein with sequence similarity to both the TLR4 and TLR13 proteins of mammals and TLR21 of teleosts. The data are publicly available on GenBank, FigShare, and from the NCBI Short Read Archive under accession number SRP044374. CONCLUSIONS:This represents the first shotgun elasmobranch genome and will aid studies of molecular systematics, biogeography, genetic differentiation, and conservation genetics in this and other shark species, as well as providing comparative data for studies of evolutionary biology and immunology across the jawed vertebrate lineages.

Dataset Information

Feeding the world's largest fish: highly variable whale shark residency patterns at a provisioning site in the Philippines.

Publications

Feeding the world's largest fish: highly variable whale shark residency patterns at a provisioning site in the Philippines.

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