The Negative Impacts of Whale-Watching
By E. Parsons. 2012
160 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Whale watching is an international industry worth more than US$2 billion globally and is currently the greatest economic activity reliant upon cetaceans. However, there is concern that whale watching is detrimental to the target species. Numerous studies have shown that cetaceans exhibit behavioral changes in response to whale-watching boat traffic. Some of these behavioral changes involve inhibiting biologically important behaviors such as feeding and resting. There is convincing evidence for some species that these can translate into population-level effects such as reduced reproductive rates. Whale watching can also cause direct mortality through collisions between vessels and animals. The introduction of guidelines or regulations for whale watching has been the most common method of trying to mitigate the impacts of boat-based whale watching. However, there is great variety in the comprehensiveness of guidelines, and even if operators have guidelines, compliance with them can be poor. Compliance might be improved if guidelines have legal under-pinnings, with monitoring and enforcement or via pressure to comply by other operators and whale-watching tourists. Simple guidelines may be more easily complied with that ones requiring specialist knowledge. Likewise undertaking simple measures, such as establishing temporal or spatial “refuges” protecting biologically important areas (e.g., feeding grounds) where whale-watching activity is prohibited, could be an appropriate mitigation strategy.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d514a4dfc7707bb4ce0cd8328559210fed6a5b0
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In Ecology
Citations in the corpus
- Theory of planned behaviour: predicting tourists’ pro-environmental intentions after a humpback whale encounter (2019, background): “…addition to environmental disturbances from the close proximity CONTACT Eleanor Clark emc016@student.usc.edu.au School of Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Australia 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group of human and vessel traffic (Parsons, 2012).”
- Changes in bottlenose dolphin whistle parameters related to vessel presence, surface behaviour and group composition (2016, background): “However, a considerable body of work has shown that boats and boat-based cetacean watching can have multiple negative impacts on the behaviour of the focal individual, population or species (Parsons, 2012).”