A message to all divers: Don’t hand-feed the groupers while diving wrecks. "Feeding marine fish is a bad deal for all, including divers, fish and the ecosystem," says Dan Roberts, a scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). It’s the basis for the FWC’s unanimous vote to prohibit divers from feeding marine life in Florida in 2001.

Reasons abound to discourage hand-feedings.

Fish have memories and can learn through behavioral conditioning, says Roberts. "When this happens, fish anticipate the hand-feeding experience and depend on handouts from divers." That means reef fish conditioned to take an easy meal from divers begin anticipating meals, which interrupts natural feeding cycles. A familiar scenario to those who have experienced the hungry swarms of rays, groupers, grunts and sharks on well-known tropical reef sites where hand-feedings take place.

"A fish conditioned to feed on diver deliveries may actually stop normal foraging patterns and become malnourished, stressed and can even die," says Roberts. Continually feeding fish may unintentionally domesticate a wild animal while still in the wild, which makes hand-fed fish especially vulnerable to predators.

Some captive fish are reported to act more like dogs begging for a meal. Species such as red drum and snook, maintained by the FWC”s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, "become almost tame and partially domesticated to the point where they learn feeding routines, including locations of feed, times of feeding and possibly even the person feeding them," Roberts wrote in a release.

In layman’s terms, those "interactive marine experiences" from The Bahamas should not continue once you return home. Besides, hand-feeding-induced attacks on humans do occur; moray eels, sharks and barracuda get the most publicity. But who wants to get chomped by a goliath grouper?

To read the entire article, go to http://research.myfwc.com/education/view_article.asp?id=30427.