By Matt Ramos

An unfortunate trend within the marketing segment of the sport diving industry has been to increasingly encourage and promote the feeding, touching and/or handling of marine life. Scenes of scuba divers engaging in such activities are frequent in dive tourism advertising.

Perhaps the purveyors of such images are trying to convey the idea to timid diving prospects that our oceans are really safe and friendly places; nonetheless, regardless of the reasons, the activities these images and the dive marketing community are promoting in this regard constitute advocating an environmentally unsound policy.

Trying to communicate feelings of affection, support, or understanding by petting or feeding marine animals may be satisfying to humans, but all available scientific evidence suggests that such practices actually harm the intended "friend". Such activities constitute serious behavioral disruptions for marine life, and threaten their health and survival.

There are several ways in which such activities may be harmful. First, unnatural feeding opportunities,may lead to lasting behavioral changes that may in the long term, prove counterproductive. In general, animals are adapted to rely upon certain natural foods found in their environments to satisfy all their nutritional needs, and other foodstuffs may be unhealthy for them. Fish are surprisingly fast learners as well as opportunistic feeders, and our efforts to feed them may lead to increased risk of falling prey themselves or attempting to use food sources that may be harmful.

Because of widespread recognition among protected area managers and experts that the "feeding the bears" syndrome is a serious problem, stringent educational programs, regulations, and enforcement have been developed in our national parks and refuges to eliminate this form of environmental damage. Thus, it would seem intuitively irresponsible that the very behavior now prohibited in virtually all U.S. and Canadian National Parks, both terrestrial and marine, is actually encouraged through example by segments of the sport diving industry.

Touching marine life may also prove hazardous to their health. The precise positioning and orientation of simple marine invertebrates is often critical to their survival; simply picking one up to examine it more closely, and then returning it to what may appear to you to be the same place may in fact prove lethal to the object of your curiosity. Also, fishes, corals, and some other animals secrete a protective mucous layer that serves as a barrier to infection and the loss of water to the surrounding sea. Disrupting that barrier by touching these animals may subject them to increased risk of infection as well as increased stress in maintaining water balance.

It would seem most ironic that such problems are increasing today, rather than being systematically and methodically eliminated. One of the strongest motivations for people to engage in SCUBA diving and reef exploring is that it provides an all-too-rare opportunity to leave for a while the artificial worlds we have created and see nature up close, and in the raw.

A primary reason for visiting places like coral reefs is to observe a great diversity of marine life in its natural state. Watching a beautifully adapted predator like a shark or barracuda snatch dead fish from the hands of an underwater circus performer is a cheap carnival trick, not an observation of nature at her finest.

In recent years, the practice of feeding sharks and fishes has been banned by the U.S. states of Florida and Hawaii, and by some nations heavily invested in dive tourism, including the Cayman Islands (Caribbean). Some of the world's leading marine conservation organizations and governmental agencies (U.S. and Canada National Parks, NOAA Marine Sanctuary Program, United Nations Environmental Program) have denounced the practice of feeding and harassing marine animals.

Yet, the practice and its promotion persist within the sport diving industry. The Bahamas is particularly notorious for actively promoting shark feeding dives, although many environmentally responsible Bahamian dive operators there refuse to participate is such ill-advised practices.

If you consider yourself an environmentally responsible diver, or want to become more so, please do your part to support the protection of marine life by patronizing dive operations that refuse to engage is such practices, and avoiding dive operations that do.

For more information on coral reef marine life and coral reef ecosystems, visit us at:

http://www.coral-reef-info.com

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