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Every December, hundreds of humpback whales arrive at Bahía de Banderas, a warm and turquoise bay nestled along Mexico’s western coast, right where the states of Jalisco and Nayarit meet.
Following a long voyage from the cold seas of Alaska, the whales mate, give birth and nurture their calves in the bay before heading back north at the end of March.
“Bahía de Banderas is the most important reproduction site for humpback whales along Mexico’s continental coastline,” said Iyari Espinoza, a marine biologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Guadalajara.
The bay is also home to Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit, two resort areas that have witnessed explosive growth over the last couple of decades.
Indeed, tens of thousands of tourists visiting Bahía de Banderas will go on whale watching vessels every winter. These vessels must comply with regulations issued in October 2011 by the Mexican Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT).
These regulations seek to guarantee the protection and conservation of whale species in Mexico, including the humpback whale.
Almost 14 years after the regulations were issued, however, research has found that they aren’t being followed often.
A recent study published in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management evaluates the extent to which boat tours in Bahía de Banderas comply with five different guidelines outlined in SEMARNAT’s 2011 regulations.
These guidelines specify, among other things, the angle at which a boat should approach a whale, the minimum distance a boat should keep from a whale and the maximum time a boat should stay near the same whale.
To conduct this assessment, researchers attended 73 different sightseeing tours over four years, boarding a total of 14 vessels with eight different tourism companies.
Every time a vessel stopped to observe a whale for over one minute, the researchers would record whether SEMARNAT’s guidelines had been followed.
After analyzing a total of 303 sighting events, the study’s authors reported that 88 percent of the sightings had breached at least one of the guidelines.
They also found that 35 percent of sightings involved groups of mothers and calves. “These are the most vulnerable groups,” said Espinoza, who is the first author of the study. “They are in their stage of growth, breastfeeding and learning.”
Such high levels of non-compliance cause whales to engage in avoidance strategies that demand a higher energy expenditure, including more frequent changes in their swimming direction and their level of activity near the water’s surface.
Because humpback whales do not feed in Bahía de Banderas, this increased expenditure constitutes a serious problem: The whales “only come here to reproduce, spending months without eating,” said Espinoza.
“When their energy reserves are exhausted as a product of tourism pressure, it can provoke significant effects at an energy level and therefore at a population level.”
The study identifies potential reasons why tour guides might breach the guidelines, voluntarily or not. These include meteorological conditions, a lack of proper navigation equipment and social dynamics between visitors and tour guides.
“Tourists will frequently pressure tour guides into approaching the whales more closely, and service providers will in turn approach the whales too rapidly to provoke the whales and make them leap out of the water,” said Gisela Heckel, a professor of conservation biology at the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Baja California.
“There is bad behavior on both ends: on behalf of the tourists, ignorance; and on behalf of the service providers, a desire to satisfy tourists and get a good tip,” said Heckel, who was also involved in the study.
In 2023, Espinoza also authored a study in which she reported that foreign visitors, most of them from the United States and Canada, make up the majority of whale watching tourists in Bahía de Banderas. The study reveals that most of these foreign tourists do not travel to the bay for the purpose of whale watching.
As a result, tourists may have misguided expectations that could lead them to pressure their tour guides into violating SEMARNAT’s guidelines. As Heckel explained, tourists visiting the bay will often have seen images of people touching gray whales in other parts of Mexico, such as Baja California, and expect a similar experience.
“They will get there and believe that they will be able to touch the humpback whales, but they are mistaken because they can’t see that those are photos of people touching gray whales,” she said.
The findings reported by Espinoza and colleagues are neither specific to whales nor Bahía de Banderas. In March, researchers published a study evaluating whether dolphin-watching in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo complied with guidelines issued by the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas.
Their findings, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, show that 98 percent of the watching events do not abide by the guidelines.
More recently, a study by Whale Shark Mexico, a conservation and education research project, assessed the sustainability of tourism related to whale sharks, the world’s largest fish species, in Bahía de la Paz, a bay in Baja California Sur.
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In contrast with humpback whale watching in Bahía de Banderas, whale shark tourism in Bahía de la Paz involves swimming with the animals in the open water.
Following a significant surge in tourist arrivals, service providers began offering swimming tours to visitors around 2000.
“It was observed [then] that so many individual [sharks] visiting the zone were receiving lesions caused by boats,” said Alberto García, the executive director of Whale Shark Mexico.
In light of these observations, SEMARNAT established a management plan in 2006 outlining how whale shark tourism should be conducted in the area.
Upon noticing that not all tour guides were complying with the management plan, Whale Shark Mexico, together with SEMARNAT, began providing training sessions for tourism service providers.
Even with these trainings, however, the research team continued to document increases in the number of sharks injured by boats.
This led SEMARNAT to officially declare Bahía de la Paz an area for the protection of whale sharks in 2018.
“It regularized all tourism activities,” said García, the first author of the recent study. “It updated the management plan, based on a carrying capacity model indicating how many boats should simultaneously be in the area.”
But nearly seven years after the declaration of the refuge area, Whale Shark Mexico’s recent study has shown that between 50 percent and 60 percent of whale sharks in Bahía de la Paz continue to exhibit injuries.
“We’ll see cuts or amputations because of the boats, or scratches, which are generally the result of tourist activities,” García said.
Importantly, these injuries are not the product of deliberate rule-breaking—a key difference from what Espinoza and colleagues reported in Bahía de Banderas.
“There is no malpractice exercised purposefully,” said García. “Tour guides are very aware of how they must follow the norms.”
In an interview for Mexican magazine Gatopardo, for instance, tour guide Rogelio Camacho shared his experience attending SEMARNAT training workshops.
Referencing his participation in the workshops, Camacho said that they breed respect for the whale shark and assure service providers that they are engaged in “a clean activity.”
Regardless, the findings of the study indicate that whale shark tourism in the bay continues to exert negative pressures on the animals.
Therefore, García and colleagues find it necessary to once more implement changes for the management of whale shark tourism in Bahía de la Paz.
In their study, the researchers from Whale Shark Mexico propose that personnel from the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) be present in the refuge so as to ensure adherence to regulations.
Furthermore, they recommend that the existing carrying capacity model—which limits the number of boats in the area to 14 at a time—be substituted for a dynamic model: one that sets the limit as a function of the monthly average number of sharks in the area.
Referencing her own research on humpback whales in Bahía de Banderas, Espinoza, too, suggests greater monitoring by PROFEPA.
“It is the only authority with the faculties to sanction and even take away permits from [non-compliant] companies,” she said.
Espinoza also highlights the importance of raising awareness. “In many regions of the world, it has been demonstrated that raising awareness not only among tour guides but also among tourists can help with the issue of compliance,” she said.
If tourists are more informed about the regulations, they will stop pressuring their guides to allow them to approach the whales and “stay longer with them.”
García, Whale Shark Mexico’s executive director, emphasizes the potential contributions of ecotourism to the economy and society of local communities in marine protected areas.
“I know that the tourism sector feels attacked, but in the case of the whale shark, it is beneficial more than anything,” he said. “Tourism brings many benefits to conservation.”
“We might be better off than other places,” he said, referencing the unsustainability of Mexican tourism hotspots, such as Cancún. “But that doesn’t mean we cannot keep improving.”
