As anti-whaling NGOs continue to proclaim that whalers should somehow become tour guides, scientists are beginning to document problems with the whale watch industry.

The May 1st issue of Science News detailed the response to clusters of tour boats surrounding and following pods off Washington State. Over the last three years, the increasing numbers of motors has caused a negative response in the animals. The whales lengthen their calls, possibly in an attempt to continue to communicate with each other in an increasingly loud and stressful environment.

This is also documented in the April 29 issue of Nature by Dr. Andrew D. Foote, of the University of Durham in England. Dr.Foote's co-author, Rus Hoelzel, adds that the increasing length of Orca calls "is certainly a red flag", and he believes that, "Maybe we ought to think about fewer boats." In the area they studied, each Orca pod is commonly attended by an average of 22 boats, surrounding and following the animals as they feed and try to keep track of each other. The local stock of three pods off the coast of Washington State has been declining since 1977, although the reason for the decline is not known. The authors feel that whale watching is a good thing, but that it needs more careful regulation.

A similar study has been conducted in the coastal waters of New Zealand, by researchers whose work appears in Biological Conservation, 117:299-307. R. Constantine, D. H. Brunton, and T. Dennis note that bottlenose dolphins are significantly affected by the growth of the whale watch industry. These scientists found that as the number of boats increased, the dolphins reacted with more milling about and by resting less often. The decrease in resting behavior was found to be "substantial". The scientists suggest that "current legislation in New Zealand is not affording this isolated population protection from disturbance".

It is interesting that, in each case, the scientists suggest that human behavior should be modified, but not necessarily prohibited. In the matter of whale harvests too, scientists have gone to great lengths to prescribe exact precautions and human behavior modification, as to the number of whales that may be safely taken, and the ways in which this must be monitored. The Revised Management Procedure (RMP) is a cautious approach that permits, within precisely defined limits, the sustainable harvest of whales, regulating but not prohibiting, the hunting of them.

However, the difference between responses to the activities of whale watching and whale harvesting, is in the behavior of political actors. At the IWC, NGOs lobby to ignore the advice of scientists that recommend behavior modification in whale harvests for the sake of cetacean sustainability. Anti-whaling nations demand that whaling cease completely. Yet, so far, politicians are not arguing that whale watching is so harmful that it should be stopped altogether. This may be because it would be politically difficult for nations to attack their own tourist industries. Or it may simply be that the animal rights and welfare NGOs haven't started their anti-whale watching campaigns yet.