Diving deeper into the underlying white shark behaviors at Guadalupe Island, Mexico
Abstract
Fine-scale movement patterns are driven by both biotic (hunting, physiological needs) and abiotic (environmental conditions) factors. The energy balance governs all movement-related strategic decisions. Marine environments can be better understood by considering the vertical component. From 24 acoustic trackings of 10 white sharks in Guadalupe Island, this study linked, for the first time, horizontal and vertical movement data and inferred six different behavioral states along with movement states, through the use of hidden Markov models, which allowed to draw a comprehensive picture of white shark behavior. Traveling was the most frequent state of behavior for white sharks, carried out mainly at night and twilight. In contrast, area-restricted searching was the least used, occurring primarily in daylight hours. Time of day, distance to shore, total shark length, and, to a lesser extent, tide phase affected behavioral states. Chumming activity reversed, in the short term and in a nonpermanent way, the behavioral pattern to a general diel vertical pattern.
Citation
Aquino-Baleytó , M , Leos-Barajas , V , Adam , T , Hoyos-Padilla , M , Santana-Morales , O , Galván-Magaña , F , González-Armas , R , Lowe , C G , Ketchum , J T & Villalobos , H 2021 , ' Diving deeper into the underlying white shark behaviors at Guadalupe Island, Mexico ' , Ecology and Evolution , vol. Early View , 8178 . https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8178
Publication
Ecology and Evolution
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-7758Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
We thank grants and logistic support from Alianza WWF-Fundación Carlos Slim, Alianza WWF-Telcel, Annenberg Foundation, Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research (PIER), and Fundación Mundo Azul. HV, FGM, and RGA acknowledge support from SNI (CONACYT), and COFAA and EDI programs from Instituto Politécnico Nacional.Collections
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