#Reef manta ray series#

#Reef manta ray series#

Marine Ecology Progress Series DOI:10.3354/meps13178Įlitza Gemanov, Andrea Marshall, I. Stephanie Venables, Daniel Van Duinkerken, Christopher Rohner, Andrea Marshall (2020) Habitat use and movements patterns of reef manta rays Mobula alfredi in southern Mozambique. Endangered Species Research DOI:10.3354/esr01054

Jessica Pate, Andrea Marshall (2020) Urban Manta Rays: Juvenile manta ray habitat along a highly developed Florida coastline. Stephanie Venables, Andrea Marshall, Amelia Armstrong, Joseph Tomkins, Jason Kennington (2020) Fine-scale population structure and effective population size of reef manta rays Mobula alfredi in southern Mozambique using genome-wide SNPs. Mobula birostris (amended version of 2011 assessment). Marshall, A., Bennett, M.B., Kodja, G., Hinojosa-Alvarez, S., Galvan-Magana, F., Harding, M., Stevens, G. Marshall, A., Barreto, R., Carlson, J., Fernando, D., Fordham, S., Francis, M.P., Herman, K., Jabado, R.W., Liu, K.M., Pacoureau, N., Rigby, C.L., Romanov, E. Half a century of global decline in oceanic sharks and rays. Nathan Pacoureau,, Andrea Marshall,, and Nick Dulvy (2020). She is confident this will become one of the most important marine protected areas in Africa, the equivalent of Africa’s Marine Serengeti. To that end she has dedicated her life to the development of a large-scale network of marine protected areas along the Mozambican coastline and hopes to use MMF’s science to inform the management strategies being developed for marine megafauna in the country. Having worked in Africa for the last 20 years she realizes that research alone will not protect our ocean giants here. She has visited over 45 countries and been fortunate enough to pioneer the exploration of many remote coastlines.Īndrea’s passionate commitment to the eastern African coast has ultimately shaped her goals as a conservation biologist. During her 20-year research career she has travelled to the ends of the globe, from Brazil to Myanmar, mainly as a scientist but also as a semi-professional underwater photographer, her other great passion. As one of MMF’s co-founders, Andrea also works at an executive level within the organization.Īndrea spends most of her time in the field. Andrea directs MMF’s global manta ray department and MMF’s threatened species program in southern Mozambique. Learning to dive at a young age, Andrea got certified on her twelfth birthday and now almost 10,000 dives later she leads research programs all over the world for MMF, as one of the principal scientists for the organization. This might help coral reefs receive nutrients over longer timescales – both night and day – than if the mantas relied only on prey items available only during the day, as some other reef fishes are.Andrea has always been passionate about the ocean. Reef mantas also eat emergent zooplankton, which suggests that they are also feeding at night. Reef mantas are therefore hypothesised to act as nutrient cyclers: these ocean travellers bring nutrients from a system nearby, to key sites on the coral reef where their faeces are the fertilizer of sorts, helping corals grow and flourish. There, while the mantas socialise and have parasites removed from their bodies, their faeces may provide the basis for a rich nutrient supply. Lauren’s study shows that reef mantas feed predominantly on pelagic zooplankton in the St Joseph Channel during the day, before returning to a coral reef cleaning station to the north of D’Arros Island. The remaining 38% of their diet was made of emergent zooplankton – those planktonic creatures that emerge from the seabed at night and rise into the water column – and 17% was of mesopelagic plankton, which are often found further offshore, swimming in deeper ocean regions. Photo by Ryan Daly | © Save Our Seas FoundationĪnd so what is the food of choice of reef manta rays? These ocean giants preferred the most microscopic of seafood snacks: 45% of their diet was comprised of pelagic zooplankton, tiny animals that swim near the ocean’s surface. Researchers observe a reef manta ray at a cleaning station at D'Arros Island.