Abstract
In-water viewing of sharks by tourists has become a popular and lucrative industry. There is some concern that interactions with tourists with ecotourism operations might harm sharks through disruption of behaviours. Here, we analysed five years of whale shark (Rhincodon typus) encounter data by an ecotourism industry at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to assess the impact of ecotourism interactions on shark visitation, within the context of the biological and physical oceanography of the region. Our data base consisted of 2823 encounter records for 951 individual whale sharks collected by ecotourism operators between 2007 and 2011. We found that total encounters per whale shark and encounters per boat trip increased through time. On average, whale sharks re-encountered in subsequent years were encountered earlier, stayed longer and tended to be encountered more often within a season than sharks that were only encountered in a single year. Sequential comparisons between years did not show any patterns consistent with disturbance and the rate of departure of whale sharks from the aggregation was negatively correlated to the number of operator trips. Overall, our analysis of this multi-year data base found no evidence that interactions with tourists affected the likelihood of whale shark re-encounters and that instead, physical and biological environmental factors had a far greater influence on whale shark visitation rates. Our approach provides a template for assessing the effects of ecotourism interactions and environmental factors on the visitation patterns of marine megafauna over multiple years.
Highlights
Ecotourism has become increasingly popular over the past 20 years and is a rapidly growing sector within the tourism industry [1]
Between 2007 and 2011, there were a total of 2823 whale shark encounters (x = 564.6 ± 76 SE encounters per year, range = 309–772) by the ecotourism industry (Table 1)
We found no evidence for long-term disruption of visitation patterns of whale sharks from ecotourism encounters
Summary
Ecotourism has become increasingly popular over the past 20 years and is a rapidly growing sector within the tourism industry [1]. Marine environments support a range of ecotourism attractions, often providing opportunities to view iconic megafauna at close range [2,3,4]. The economic benefits of shark diving can be considerable [3,6] and provide a compelling argument for conservation of shark species, as well as an alternative to extractive practices like fishing [6,7,8,9]. For this reason, shark diving is considered an integral part of conservation strategies for these animals [5]
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