The Controversy of Swimming with Humpback Whales

How close are you willing to get to see a humpback whale? We've seen whale watching boats and people get pretty close even though there are regulations and distances to see a whale. But how close are you willing to get? Are you willing to get in the water with a humpback whale? And then what would you be comfortable in

terms of a distance of a humpback whale? And then if I tell you, you can't really control the distance you have from a humpback whale because you're floating in the water, And they're coming at the speed that they're coming at. And if they want to come see you, they're going to come see you. We're going to talk about an incident that happened with swim with whale tourism industry in Australia, where a humpback whale actually carried a guy out of the water and

put him back in. He was OK, but it's kind of causing a little bit of a controversy with the swim with whale industry and how it changes and impacts humpback whale behavior. before and after the interaction. So we're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And this is an episode where I want people to take action. I just don't know where we could take action. I have a feeling it starts with government, so we're gonna get into that.

But this story came to me from Stephanie Stack, who is a good friend of mine, a colleague, She is in Australia during her PhD on whale tourism impacts from humans. She's just a great person. She's been on the podcast before talking about whales and her work with the Pacific Whale Foundation. Now she's doing a PhD in Australia. She came to me, not really came to me, but she posted a video. of an incident that occurred and her thoughts on this incident for a swim with whale outfit.

And this company, basically what happens is you take this, a set of people, tourism, tourist people who want to go out to see some whales, instead of just being on a whale watching boat where you're staying, you stay on the boat and you watch these whales and you follow, you know, all the protocols and all the regulations that are around these whales, they get into the water. They hold on to what they call a mermaid line, which

is essentially just a line in the water so you can hold on so you don't drift off. You're in the ocean, you're snorkeling, and you basically put your head in the water, you stay at the surface, put your head in the water, and you watch these

whales, in this case humpback whales, swim by. And it's kind of like this immersive experience where you're in the water with the whales, and you don't really think as a tourist that the whales could come to see you or get as close as possible with you, but, it happens and in this case it happened a little too close people were in the water there's a video out i'm not going to show it on this uh on this uh episode you can watch it otherwise you can watch it online i'll put a link to

the video but and i'll put the link also to the instagram post that uh that stephanie put up on her thoughts on it but essentially what happened the other day i guess over this video is The people were in the water, they had their faces in the water, and you can see they had cameras. There was a YouTube couple, I guess, that shared their experiences. And they shared their experience with this, where they were looking in the water. They

see this humpback whale come pretty close. And I don't know what the normal distances are, but they're pretty close. Normally, a whale-watching vessel has to stay within like 300 meters or 300 meters away from the animals depending and if they come closer they have to shut their engines off and things like that. But this time they're in the water and this humpback whale comes close and

it comes closer and closer and they kind of lift up in the video. The couple that's taking the video is lifting up their head being like, wow, look at this. This is really cool. Like it came so close. And as the one woman is turning back to her partner that does the video, I don't know much about them. I don't know if they're married, if

they're related or whatever. They look back, she looks back and All you see in the background is one of the people that are in the water get lifted up by this humpback whale Probably about five feet out of the air and then drop back in the guy was okay. He was actually the guy the tour guide Part of the outfit part of the the company that was taking them out and he was fine. Thank God he was fine and The whale didn't look like it was harmed, they didn't talk about the whale in the

video, but it looked okay. It didn't look like there was any damage from what I saw, but again, I don't know what that damage would be or how it was damaged, because you don't really see

the humpback whale after, you just see it go into the water and swim away. This guy comes out this there's a there's a video on all I'll put the link like I said on the telegraph they posted a link of the after effects so the people after on the boat people are smiling the guy who was lifted out of the water is high-fiving and he's getting pretty excited Stephanie talked about how he was on the news and he talked about how this was so

great and he enjoyed the experience, it was such a cool experience. Here's the problem in the entire incident. The incident itself is the human was in contact with the whale physically. not safe for the human, potentially unsafe for the humpback whale, but it's going to be a distraction to the humpback whale. It's going to be a disturbance to the humpback whale, which you're not supposed to do. And that's just more ethically than anything

else, but it's part of the rules as well. But sometimes you can't control it. And I think herein lies the problem is you can't control how close the humpback whale comes to you or how close you can come. You can control how close you come, in contact with how close you come from the humpback whale, but not necessarily the other way around, as in this case. But the problem is, this guy's talking about how it was such a cool experience, what a lovely

experience it was. But the thing is, is these humpback whales are huge. They can be dangerous, not thinking that like, not that they do it on purpose, they can be dangerous. There's a lot of fluke slaps, which is the tail. They just slap their tail on the water. You get hit in the head with that, you could be knocked out. There are fin slaps as well. So they could slap their fin, they'll come in. And sometimes that's a behavior to say, hey, get away from me. Other

times, we don't really know what the behavior is. I'm not a behavioralist. But these can be dangerous situations for the tourists. And the tourists themselves are not people who understand the dangers. If you go out on a boat, and you just want to see whales, and you're like, hey, this could be a cool experience. You get in the water, and you see this humpback whale come close. You're like, oh, this is awesome. But now, what happens when you're looking up, and there's a tail or

fluke coming up, and it's about to slap on top of your head? This tourist is just, unfortunately, not to say it in a bad way, is just ignorant of the dangers that could happen if they're not explained to you on the ship. Now, I don't know if the dangers and risks were explained to you on a ship. I don't know if they have to sign a waiver or what have you. I'm

not too familiar with these types of behaviors. But Stephanie did write a paper, along with other ecologists and so forth, about the behavioral impacts of commercial swimming with whale tours on humpback whales, and in the abstract, She concludes that there were disturbances. So there was, let's just see, the number of direct changes made by the whales was the highest when swimmers were in the water and the whales did not resume undisturbed behavior after the swimmers exited the

water. So in other words, it's not as if they continued on their way to the same way they were going, they had to actually change directions. They said there was a 50% reduction in the proportion of time that whales spent resting during uh... swim tours compared to during whale watch tours. That's what the comparison was like. One, is there a disturbance from the swim with whales? And then what about the comparison

with whale watching boats where they're not in the water? So there's a 50% reduction in the proportion of time that whale spent resting. Now here's the thing though. In both tour types, the time spent engaging in various behaviors was impacted by the distance between the vessel and the whales. These results support the conclusion that the behavior of humpback whales, and this is in Hervey Bay, was

altered in response to swim with whale tourism. As humpback whales are capital breeders with limited energy reserves, this is the important part, reducing disturbance to them is of high importance for their continued population recovery

and for the sustainability of the marine tourism industry. In Australia where swim with whale tourism is becoming more established, robust education and enforcement programs combined with continued monitoring of population dynamics through scientific research are needed to minimize impacts to the population and guide adaptive management strategies. In other words, this needs to be research, this needs to be monitored and the regulations need to change along with the differences that

they see over time. So adaptive management is basically, how is the management going now? Okay, something's changed, we need to go back and revise this management or this enforcement plan or these regulations to ensure that it entails something completely new. And that can change with anything. You know, there are situations where there's a mother and a calf that are different than a situation where it's

just a whale on its own, right? The mother is gonna be more protective when her calf is around compared to not having a calf around, right? So there's a lot of differences in going in. And I found some other, there was another one in 2019, the effects of whale-based tourism in Vavrou, Vavrou? I think it's called Ntanga, Kingdom of Ntanga, behavioral responses of

humpback whales to vessel and swimming tourism activities. And they found that it's an important calving ground for the Oceania humpback whale population, Vavau is, and these findings should be carefully considered by stakeholders in Ntanga and at the other locations where swim with whale opportunities are being undertaken. So basically what happened is, let's see, Low levels

of compliance to the existing Tonga swim with whale regulations were documented. In particular, the stipulated whale resting time between interactions with tour operator vessels and swimmers was often not respected. So this is the thing. These humpback whales need some rest time between these interactions, and that wasn't actually respected, and it wasn't followed. So rest time seemed to be an occurrence that

continues to come up all the time. It's an issue. They need to have their rest time, and it's not being monitored, it's not being abided by, and that's a big problem. It seems like others, vessel approach time, swimmer placement, and vessel avoidance responses were also recorded. Results indicate that the average diving time and the proportion of time spent diving in the presence of swimming activities

increased significantly for mother and calf pairs. So that, you know, there are definitely changes within the behaviors of these humpback whales, especially mother calf, where resting is needed, but they have to dive further because they want to avoid these swim with whale outfits and these swim with whales instances. So here's the thing. is swim with whales what we need? A lot of times we look at it from a human perspective, like this is really cool. We could really get a lot of knowledge from

being in the water with them. We can have this immersive experience, literally immersive experience with these whales and be able to connect with them and have this bond and energy that we have within the relationship that we develop with these whales while we're in the water. And then we go off and we want to protect these whales. So there could be an argument for the conservation of these whales by being in the water when these whales go by. However, is this right for the humpback whale? It's

obviously affecting their behavior around it. So there needs to be more regulations with the swim with whales that happens. Now, within Queensland, this is where this incident with the video happened that I mentioned earlier, it doesn't seem as though there are specific regulations for swim with whales. Most of the regulations and rules for watching marine mammals is all about their approach and like cautionary zones, no approach

zones. If there's certain number of boats and there's more, if there's three boats within the cautionary zone, then there can't be any more. So there's all these rules around it, like the three boat rule, when a marine mammal approaches a boat, what to do. when a marine mammal appears disturbed, what to do. Other situation where specific approach distance apply. So there's a lot of things happening where the one thing I see, a person in or entering the water, not within

100 meters of a whale or 50 meters of a dolphin. So these are specific situations where these approach distances, the problem is there's not a lot of language around it. And if this is all I'm seeing, It just seems like more of general rules, it doesn't seem like it's specific laws from what I see. And I'm just opening here, I didn't have it open, I should have it open. I'm just opening here the... the interaction I had with Stephanie getting some information.

And I asked, I said, is there a committee of whale watching companies to look after this? And they said the only example that she knows of was in Hervey Bay where she did her study where the whale watching fleet developed their own code of conduct for following the swim tours, extra regulations on top of a permit condition. So outside of that, it's really up to every operator for themselves. So there's not a

lot of you know, talking in between. We see this a lot of times with operators, where there's not a lot of connections in terms of like, let's go above and beyond. And it's not necessarily because they don't want to, they want to bring out their tourists, they want this to be sustainable. So I'm not saying that these are bad operators. They just need to follow a little bit more rules. They need to understand, maybe have a little bit more connection with

the scientific community, the conservation community. People like Stephanie who study this and just be like, hey, guys, look, I understand you want to do this, but there need to be a little bit more rules around it. You need to go above and beyond. And maybe let's talk to the operators at Harvey Bay, which went through this and went through the study. And I know a lot of times, like Stephanie was on these boats talking and building relationships with these people. And

I think that's really interesting. And I said, are there regulations? And she said, yeah, they exist, but they need to be strengthened and enforced. The company that says they complained they did nothing wrong and they followed the rules. And what it looked like is it looked like the humpback whale approached them. So they may have been within the 300 meters or 100 meters in the water, but you

know, maybe the humpback approach them. So maybe there need to be extra rules and regulations that need to be added to ensure that, hey, look, we need to do something right here. This is something that that needs to happen. So here's the call to action is what we really need to do is we need to get the Queensland government on board to say more regulations need to happen. There are places, if you go to the, I'll put the link where the rules are, where

I'm looking for watching marine mammals. There are places, I'm gonna look for places where we can contact the government and just be like, send an email or send an, like, yeah, basically send an email or message to them and say, hey, We need to have better regulations. This incident cannot happen. This could have been very dangerous for the person who was in the water, for the number of people that were in the water. They could have

been hurt. If an animal breaches, like a humpback whale breaches and lands on them, who knows what that would do to a person. That can't be good either way. We've seen that happen on videos before, always cautious. They always go viral, but it can be very cautionary tale. And you don't want to ruin sort of the regulations and the protections around humpback whales. Humpback whales, yes, they're doing better than they were back, you know, 50, 60 years ago,

but we still need to protect them. They're long-lived species. Things that go wrong can really take a turn for the worst. You don't want to lose a generation through, you know, disrupting their rest times and disrupting their normal undisturbed behavior. by doing these types of tours just for our own gain. We need to make sure we protect these whales and we need to do better and make sure that these regulations and enforcements actually go through. So this is something that I want to

make sure that we go ahead and do. And I would love to hear what you think. Let me know. You can hit me up on a comment on Spotify, where I post this video on this podcast. Go to YouTube, let me know what you think. But I'd also love to hear from you on Instagram. Just hit me up at howtoprotecttheocean, and I'd love to hear what you think from there. But that's it for today's episode. I want to thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have