Migramar presented results of the Shark Research and Conservation Program of the Galapagos Marine Reserve in the Galapagos Science Symposium, which was part of the 50 year celebration of the Charles Darwin Foundation.
The Charles Darwin Foundation 50 years commemorative logo.
A talk by James Ketchum and a poster by Alex Hearn featured great part of the results of the satellite and continuous tracking as well as the tagging and censuses of sharks of the program.
The talk highlighted the fact that sharks and other open-water species had not been taken into account in the original design of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR).
Click here to download the short paper from the Proceedings of the Galapagos Science Symposium.
It was mentioned that sharks are top predators that could be used as conservation tools to conserve the rest of the open-water assemblages and their movements to re-design the GMR. That is, the size and shape of an open-water marine reserve in the Galapagos Islands can be approximated with the home ranges of such top marine predators.
Click here to download the poster.
The poster showed the results of records of attendance of tagged hammerhead sharks at underwater listening stations and the abundance of open-water species determined by underwater censusing at Wolf Island, where most records and the highest abundances coincide at the southeastern side of the island, upstream of the main current, a “hotspot” of biological abundance.
The causes of this are not fully clear, but we think it is related to feeding for open-water species at the upstream location of the island, or other uses such as cleaning stations and navigation for hammerheads.
