Recent Expansion of Marine Protected Areas Matches with Home Range of Grey Reef Sharks

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2021 Jul 10

PMID 34244536

Citations 2

Authors

Lucas Bonnin

David Mouillot

Germain Boussarie

William D Robbins

Jeremy J Kiszka

Laurent Dagorn

Laurent Vigliola

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Dramatic declines in reef shark populations have been documented worldwide in response to human activities. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) offer a useful mechanism to protect these species and their roles in coral reef ecosystems. The effectiveness of MPAs notably relies on compliance together with sufficient size to encompass animal home range. Here, we measured home range of 147 grey reef sharks, Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos, using acoustic telemetry in New Caledonia. The distribution of home range was then compared to local MPA sizes. We report a home range of 12 km of reef for the species with strong differences between adult males (21 km), adult females (4.4 km) and juveniles (6.2 km for males, 2.7 km for females). Whereas local historic MPA size seemed adequate to protect reef shark home range in general, these were clearly too small when considering adult males only, which is consistent with the reported failure of MPAs to protect sharks in New Caledonia. Fortunately, the recent implementation of several orders of magnitude larger MPAs in New Caledonia and abroad show that recent Indo-Pacific MPAs are now sufficiently large to protect the home ranges of this species, including males, across its geographical range. However, protection efforts are concentrated in a few regions and cannot provide adequate protection at a global scale.

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