Mar. 18,
2013 — Stingrays living in one of the world's most famous and heavily
visited ecotourism sites -- Stingray City/Sandbar in the Cayman
Islands -- have profoundly changed their ways, raising questions
about the impact of so-called "interactive ecotourism" on marine
wildlife, reports a new study published March 18 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Researchers
from Nova Southeastern
University 's Guy Harvey Research
Institute in Hollywood , Fla.
and the University of Rhode Island studied the southern stingray population
of Stingray City
-- a sandbar in the Cayman Islands that draws
nearly a million visitors each year to feed, pet and swim with its stingrays --
to assess how the intensive ecotourism has affected the animals' behavior.
"Measuring
that 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," said study
co-author Guy Harvey, who initiated the project.
The
researchers found that Stingray
City
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