As part of the final year of my bachelor's degree, I am undertaking a large data analysis research project. The aim for my project is to assess the impact of rising temperatures on the residency of grey reef shark in the Chagos Archipelago MPA. This project fits in the a wider research project conducted by my supervisor Dr David Jacoby between 2013 to 2020. Dr Jacoby's research assessed the impact of coral mass bleaching events which occurred in 2015 and 2016 on reef shark residency. More than 100 Grey Reef sharks were tagged, with 50 receivers set up in the region to detect the shark's movement which then produced telemetry data. Additional satellite data was used to quantify environmental factors such as SST and SST anomaly.
My analysis showed that there were significant differences in SST and SST anomaly between 2014 and 2016 at the Archipelago scale but not at the scale of individual atolls. However SST and SST anomaly during bleaching events did not seem to impact shark residency in the archipelago or at the scale of atolls. The literature shows several conflicts about the impact of environmental factors on reef shark residency. Those results could either show that rising SST and SST anomaly at this current rate are still not impacting grey reef shark and that their effects still remain benign. Or grey reef sharks would be constrained to smaller and unhealthier reefs, where they would be incapable of migrating to healthier reefs in order to adapt by modifying their residency. Indeed as they are central foragers to coral reef which have been proven to be negatively impacted by those disturbances as they have undergone mass bleaching events.