Whale-watching: Sustainable Tourism and Ecological Management

I thought I had been around during the early days of commercial whale-watching, but as I learned from reading this book, those days go back even further than I had assumed. According to the chapter by Erich Hoyt and Chris Parsons, as long ago as 1950, a disused military gun station in San Diego, California, hosted some 10,000 enthusiasts who watched the annual grey whale migration from a cliff on shore. Then in 1955, a fisherman, also in San Diego, put out a sign saying ‘See the whales: $1’ and the enterprise of whale-watching was launched. By the 1970s, when latecomers like me arrived on the scene, it was a nascent industry on both coasts of the United States, in Canada’s St Lawrence River estuary, in the lagoons of Mexico’s Baja California, and around Hawaii. It is nothing short of remarkable how far the phenomenon has come in the last 40 years. Even allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole and creative accounting, the industry grew from around 400,000 paying customers in three countries spending over US$4 million for the privilege in 1981 to nearly 13 million people in 119 countries spending more than US$872 million in 2008.

The book contains 25 chapters by a diverse contingent of 48 authors from around the world – academics, field biologists, managers, tour operators and environmental activists. It is impressively broad in scope and the editors appear to have made an admirable effort to be inclusive. There is, however, considerable unevenness in terms of analytical rigour and scholarly depth. Also, some of the chapters seem needlessly repetitive, although this may be unavoidable when trying to ensure that multiple, sometimes conflicting views of the same topic are presented for balance. The organization, style, and presentation reflect intelligent, thoughtful editing.

Three major themes permeate the volume. One is the question of whether the watching of whales and dolphins is truly benign, i.e. non-consumptive (= it does no harm to the animals being watched). Although this belief has long been accepted by many as an article of faith, there is a growing scientific consensus that cetacean-oriented tourism is at best low-consumptive and at worst just plain consumptive. The second theme concerns the compatibility of whale-watching with whaling. That is, can both types of uses of whales as resources coexist within a single nation, or even within a relatively small area? And finally, the third theme concerns the non-monetary value of whale-watching. Does watching whales (or cetaceans in general) really, as advocates insist, increase environmental sensitivity and awareness and change the behaviour of the people who engage in it, thereby offsetting much or all of any unintended harmful effects on the animals? In the following paragraphs I mention some of the ways in which these three themes are addressed in the book.

Theme 1. It is slightly ironic that one of the biggest news items to emerge from this year’s International Marine Conservation Congress did not concern the familiar threat of too much whaling, but instead the much less familiar threat of overly zealous whale- (and dolphin-) watching (Cressey 2014). What may seem like a rather gross mismatch at first blush – a solitary whaleman firing a deadly harpoon from the deck of a catcher boat into a humpback whale or minke whale versus boatloads of persistent cetophiles seeking close-up encounters with the objects of their affection – is in fact not as great a stretch of the imagination as one might think. There is a growing body of evidence, much of it summarized convincingly in this book, that the impacts of tourism on cetaceans, although often subtle and incremental, may be as or more harmful to cetacean populations, over the long term, as a carefully managed hunt of a regularly monitored population. Specific examples are provided in chapters on how too much disturbance can affect the energy budgets and foraging behaviour of salmon-eating ‘resident’ killer whales in British Columbia (Canada), essential daytime resting, calf-rearing and socializing bouts in the daily cycle of island-associated spinner dolphins in Hawaii, and vital rates of bottlenose dolphins living in semi-enclosed environments such as Doubtful Sound (New Zealand) and Shark Bay (Australia).

The chapter by David Lusseau, ‘Ecological constraints and the propensity for population consequences of whale-watching disturbances’, is especially stimulating and informative on the question of how to measure the effects of repeated exposure to close approaches by boats. He emphasizes the importance of context in determining the level of impact of whale-watching. One needs to consider the ‘ecological landscape’ of a population – prey availability, predation risk, options for avoiding or compensating for disturbance – in order to understand its vulnerability. Also, when attempting to predict impacts, one must take into account the population’s life-history tactics and the phase of the animals’ life cycle in which the disturbance is occurring (e.g. whales on migration versus whales on a foraging or nursing ground). Lusseau concludes his chapter with a series of six scientific hypotheses meant to help ‘move the management of whale-watching into a predictive paradigm’. These are briefly (and simplistically) summarized as follows: (1) at least for baleen whales, disturbances on foraging grounds are less likely to affect vital rates than disturbances on nursing grounds; (2) spatial ecology helps determine whether a given level of disturbance will have population-level consequences; (3) patchiness of resources (spatial or temporal) in the environment limits animals’ opportunities to compensate for the effects of disturbance and therefore increases the risk of population-level consequences; (4) socio-ecological feedback mechanisms that force synchronization between critical activities of the animals (e.g. spinner dolphins entering bays to rest or socialize) and human access for watching them (daytime, calm conditions) exacerbate the population-level risk; (5) extra energy expenditure by lactating females in order to remain with a school as it moves away from a disturbing stimulus can compromise their fitness; and (6) disturbances of behaviour in marine environments, which tend to be ‘redder’ (= are dominated by long period cycles of variance; Vasseur & Yodzis 2004), are more likely to have population consequences than such disturbances in terrestrial environments.

Theme 2. A chapter by Peter Corkeron bears the provocative (and slightly playful) title, ‘Human attitudes and values: tradition and transformation and zombies’. (The zombie part refers to a concept from macroeconomics referring to an idea that ‘should have been killed off long ago, given the available evidence that it is wrong, and yet it just will not die’.) His thesis goes something like this: non-governmental organizations have traditionally taken the view that by supporting and promoting whale-watching in whaling countries like Norway, Iceland and Japan, they can demonstrate that whales are worth more alive than dead, and hence hasten the day when whaling is replaced by whale-watching as a result of sheer economic leveraging (what Corkeron calls the ‘whale-watching and whaling are fungible’ idea). However, that ‘tradition’ has been ‘transformed’ into a ‘zombie’ largely because ‘the strategy of supporting whale-watching as a replacement for whaling in whaling nations has not, and – from the evidence to date – will not, work’.

Several other chapters that also consider this slightly paradoxical situation, where whaling and whale- (and dolphin-) watching coexist, offer more nuanced perspectives. The mere fact that deliberate killing of cetaceans has not stopped completely with the rise of whale-watching in Japan, Iceland and Norway does not necessarily mean there has been no effect. Hoyt and Parsons, for example, in their overview of the whale-watch industry, insist that nature tourism operators, particularly in Iceland, which ‘commanded one of the highest growth rates for whale-watching in the world’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s, have been strong opponents of the resumption of commercial whaling there. They also point to data from questionnaire surveys suggesting that many foreign tourists (specifically in Scotland and the Dominican Republic) would be disinclined to visit a whaling country or even a non-whaling country known to have taken a position in support of commercial whaling at meetings of the International Whaling Commission. In contrast, two chapters by Icelandic researchers, also dependent on questionnaire surveys, reveal that a large percentage of tourists in Iceland do not consider the government’s pro-whaling policy as a valid reason for refusing to visit the country (an unsurprising result given that people with strong feelings otherwise would likely not have been sampled!). The take-home message from both of these chapters is that the whaling versus whale-watching debate in Iceland is lively, complex, public and very much unresolved.

Theme 3. A large part of the book is dedicated to social science studies and analyses of management and socio-economic issues. Not only is human behaviour ‘notoriously difficult to change’, as emphasized by Mark Orams and colleagues in their chapter called ‘What’s in it for the whales?’, but it is also a challenge to avoid circular reasoning, unsubstantiated claims, and various heuristic pitfalls when trying to pin down motivation, awareness and ‘commitment’ to principles. Watching whales and dolphins in the wild is often portrayed (and genuinely experienced) as thrilling, inspiring and downright awesome, which leads people to believe, intuitively and uncritically, that it must change world views, values and, yes, maybe even behaviour. This leads to the facile assumption that any detrimental impact from disturbance caused by tour boat approaches is easily made up for by the conservation benefits of having a larger, more committed cadre of advocates who have actually been on the water, witnessing the animals first-hand. Whether there is any validity to that assumption is, I’m afraid, still unclear after reading this engaging, well-edited volume.

Randall Reeves

Okapi Wildlife Associates

27 Chandler Lane, Hudson, QC, Canada

E-mail: [email protected]

© 2014 Randall Reeves