Whale Watching, Iconography, and Marine Conservation

As our populations have grown, more of us have moved to the coast. As some of us have become richer, Boeing and Airbus have allowed us to indulge our desire to see the world. Coastal vessels have become faster and safer, so we expect gratification of our desire for novel experiences at sea. As all this has happened, large whales off some coasts have increased in number, evidence that some international protection measures of the 1970s have worked. The confluence of these unrelated historical processes has led to the spectacular rise of the vessel-based whale-watching industry. Nature-based tourism does not necessarily maintain environmental quality. Ecotourism is supposed to be that special subset of nature-based tourism that provides local economic benefit without environmental degradation (Goodwin 1996). Whale watching tends to be classified as ecotourism, but it does affect whales' behavior in the short term (e.g., Corkeron 1995). The debate on how to manage whale watching has moved to whether this matters. Do "short-term" impacts have "long-term" consequences? Research to date demonstrates that anthropogenic noise is primarily responsible for the short-term behavioral changes observed. Analogs from marine hydrocarbon extraction can provide some answers to longer-term questions: use of habitat by bowhead whales seems altered by industrial activities (Schick & Urban 2000). But current thinking now calls for demonstrations of "biologically significant"—in other words, population-level—effects (e.g., International Whaling Commission 2001). How do we demonstrate these effects? Assessing the impact of dive tourism on coral reefs requires application of established impact-assessment techniques in community ecology (e.g., Plathong et al. 2000). Studies of the effects of terrestrial tourism on wildlife ask questions at the habitat scale (e.g., Burger 2000), requiring techniques that are logistically and financially beyond most research on whales. Whale demography, the history of exploitation of most whale populations, and the magnitude and variability of the ranging patterns of whales constrain studies of the impacts of whale watching on behavior. Assuming that we could detect subtle changes in rates of change of whale populations in time frames useful for managers (an unlikely premise), what would this tell us? Could we ever definitively attribute these changes to whale watching? Given other anthropogenic influences on whale populations, this is exceptionally unlikely. This being so, how do we proceed? Discussion on how to address the important questions about whale watching seems to have stagnated during a decade when the whale-watching industry grew at an estimated 12% per year (Hoyt 2001). Does anyone question the exponential growth of whale watching? Usually, such questions are raised by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) associated with environmental protection. Yet some NGOs interested in cetacean issues actively encourage the increase in commercial whale watching. The president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) wrote recently, "IFAW is now widely recognized as a driving force behind the growth and development of responsible whale watching worldwide" (O'Regan 2001). The Web sites of other NGOs (e.g., http://csiwhalesalive.org/, http://www.wdcs.org/) demonstrate that supporting whale watching is not a lone stance. I see four main arguments put forward by NGOs to justify their support for the whale-watching industry: observation induces conservation; commercial vessels are platforms of opportunity for research; viewing free-ranging animals is better than viewing captive animals; and whale watching and whaling don't mix, so whale watching provides an economically viable alternative to whaling. These arguments could be applied equally to coral reefs (replace "whaling" with "fishing"), but most NGOs interested in the conservation of coral reefs do not actively encourage mass tourism. The real reasons those interested in cetacean conservation support tourist activities lie in history, economics, and politics. Prior to the moratorium on commercial whaling in the mid-1980s, promoting whale watching demonstrated an NGO's commitment to economic development and rejection of whaling. Whale watching has gone from being a cottage industry to a large-scale, international tourism business. People now earn more from whale watching than commercial whaling (Hoyt & Hvenegaard 2002). Because there is a moratorium on commercial whaling, this is not surprising. However, this economic disparity gives rise to the opinion by NGOs that "whales and people both do better when these animals are seen and not hurt" (O'Regan 2001). This statement seems likely to be tested in the near future. Will the threat of a boycott of Icelandic tourism (including whale watching) force a reversal of the recent revival of Icelandic whaling? Norway and Japan have both whaling and whale watching, but in both countries the animals hunted differ from those being watched. The world has changed in other ways in the couple of decades since the initial promotion of whale watching. The argument over whether whale watching is good or bad influences other aspects of marine wildlife management. Commercial operations taking people to view coastal dolphins can now be found in many parts of the world. This is classified as whale watching because dolphins are cetaceans, and it inflates overall estimates of the value of whale watching (Hoyt 2001), but management issues for whales and dolphins are very different. Coastal dolphins tend to live in discrete societies with relatively small home ranges, so daily disturbance from tourist vessels becomes habitat degradation. Why does any of this matter? In the big picture of conservation concerns for cetaceans—deaths in nets, prey removal by fisheries, chemical and acoustic pollution, deliberate hunting—the effects of whale watching are pretty trivial. These effects matter, however, because whale watching is backed by NGOs working for whale conservation. Whales developed iconic value for the conservation movement in the 1970s. The collapse of populations of great whales demonstrated the extent to which we humans could destroy animal populations. Peter Matthiessen's "nothing is wasted but the whale itself" encapsulated the morality of viewing wildlife as mere resources. But the recovery of some baleen whale populations and the move from whaling to whale watching as the primary economic use of whales may not in themselves demonstrate improved environmental enlightenment. For centuries our fishing practices have affected coastal ecosystems (Jackson et al. 2001). Now we have industrialized the oceans (Smith 2000). I concentrate on fisheries here, given their role in marine ecosystem degradation (Jackson et al. 2001) and their growing importance in discussions of cetacean management. Globally, fisheries peaked in the late 1980s and are now in decline, leading to urgent calls for dramatic changes to fisheries management (Pauly et al. 2002). As our impact on the oceans grows and fish disappear, our perception of how to share the reduced wealth of the oceans with whales is changing. The dysfunction of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) as an international management organization has not lessened in the past decade, but the core reason for its dysfunction is changing. For nations with no whaling industry and less-than-exemplary records in environmental management, ritual whaler-bashing at the IWC remains a convenient conservation fig leaf. But to nations with whalers, or to those currently reviving whaling, whales are no longer natural resources to be managed sustainably but are competitors for fisheries. This leads to governmental support for research programs that seek explicitly to answer questions such as, "will fishermen be able to take more [commercial fish species] if the stocks of marine mammals are reduced?" (Schweder et al. 2000:121). The logical extension of this idea is that whales should not be allowed to recover to environmental carrying capacity but rather are in need of culling in the name of ecosystem management (see press releases under http://www.icrwhale.org). Those who wonder where this change from an emphasis on whales as resources to whales as fisheries competitors will lead only need to look at current approaches to managing coastal seal populations taken by members of The North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) for a view of one future for whales. Seals, too, are perceived as fisheries competitors. Ecological subtleties such as trophic levels matter less than the perception that fewer predators must equal more fish. In 2003 Norwegian quotas for gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) were set at 25% of abundance estimates, and a bounty paid (Anonymous 2003). Sustainable populations and minimum viable populations are becoming interchangeable terms in some nations' approaches to managing marine mammals. So the debate on managing whale killing is moving to the question of how much of the reduced productivity of the oceans and coasts should remain available to whales. This change in argument from sustainable use to culling for marine ecosystem management is an important new development in the management approach propounded by whaling nations. Can the importance of this change be reflected in the way NGOs present issues regarding whales to the public? Should whales-as-icons join flared pants and mirror balls as 1970s discards? Perhaps whales can have their iconic value refashioned. Perhaps the whale watching industry can use whales to help spread new messages about marine conservation. Should these messages say that whale populations will fare better under an internationally controlled regime of sustainable hunting rather than under culls instigated by individual nations? Does this choice, undoubtedly seen by many associated with whale watching as one between two evils, represent the best international management options available? Should seafood that is not caught in a demonstrably sustainable fashion (e.g., certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, http://www.msc.org) be provided on whale watching boats? Perhaps it is not the job of whale watching operators to instigate a consumer boycott of unsustainable fisheries, but enlightenment will require example. Should we keep seeking answers to questions that are probably unanswerable (such as that of the population-level impacts of whale watching), or should we ask other questions? Both recent work investigating changes in the behavioral states of dolphins in the presence of tourist vessels and the spatial modeling of ways to minimize vessel impacts (Lusseau 2003; Lusseau & Higham 2004) show one way forward. Maybe it is time for more answers to the question of where whale watching should not occur.