“These are extremely fresh bubs… their tail is still curled, it’s just this wobbly floppy thing that they have no control over and they’ll just flap that around and go absolutely nowhere. We call them the floppy ones” - Laura Torre-Williams
At a whale conference held last month on the land of the Butchulla people (Queensland’s Hervey Bay), researchers and tourism operators gathered to discuss emerging issues for some of the planet’s largest marine mammals.
The main focus of the conference was whale tourism, with many voicing concerns around our rapid movement from “harpooning whales, to watching them, to now jumping into the water with them,” without really understanding the potential consequences. Unlike back in the 70's, when only “hippies and scientists” were interested in whales, whale encounters are now big business and dependency on tourism dollars continues to grow.
Hunted to the brink of extinction, the humpback whale population on the east coast of Australia is now estimated to be back up around thirty thousand, increasing at a rate of around eleven percent each year. The recovery has been remarkable considering, as researcher Dr Wally Franklin noted, by the early sixties only about six hundred humpbacks across the Pacific had survived the whaling years and “it got down to probably as low as one hundred and fifty here on the east coast.”
But while the recovery of Australian humpbacks is an important success story, new anthropogenic threats loom large and the need for better protection strategies and well-funded research has never been greater.
Visiting Griffith University scholar Laura Torre-Williams has been researching newborn humpbacks on Queensland’s Gold Coast (Yugambeh country) since 2013, after increased sightings of what appeared to be newborns during the winter migration.
“The main breeding area is believed to be one thousand kilometres to the north, so how can we have newborns in the Gold Coast Bay?” is one of the questions Torre-Williams has been trying to answer.
Torre-Williams’ recently published study documented seventy-four newborns between 2013 and 2016. “We’re still documenting them every year and it’s an increasing trend,” she says. Torre-Williams also points to increased newborn sightings in a number of NSW locations and says the literature and research needs updating.
“It’s a changing world, the oceans are warming and I think it has to do a bit with climate change and the mothers perhaps saving some energy…They are perhaps going to the traditional feeding ground [Antarctica] and perhaps not finding what they need and so moving around and using energy to look for the food patches. And that can affect migration timing and that could affect their body condition and their health overall,” Torre-Williams tells me between conference sessions.
Griffith University marine scientist Dr Olaf Meynecke, along with Karen Stockin and Manue Martinez, supervised the Gold Coast research and says “there are still a lot of questions about what the increased calving rate further south means and at this point we have not been able to determine abundance on the number of calves being born south of their traditional breeding grounds.”
Dean Miller from Great Barrier Reef Legacy points to the research as yet another example of how climate change is affecting cetaceans and other animals, and the ecosystems they are part of.
“How this will impact the whales and our activities is not yet clear, but we really need to start listening to the science from all over the globe and allow it to guide us to a radical change in our race to renewables,” he says.
Climate change “as well as entanglements, noise and water pollution and ship strikes”, are just some of the pressing whale protection issues for researchers like Meynecke. “These issues are a lot more difficult to address than whaling. We are dealing with multifaceted impacts that are cumulative and often remote or invisible to the human eye. But the long term consequences can be as bad as whaling,” he says.
Torre-Williams’ research also injects urgency into concerns around recreational water users in the Gold Coast bay and should prompt other locations where calving is happening to get ahead of potential problems before they become entrenched.
The Gold Coast is now home to around 600,000 permanent residents, projected to reach one million by 2050. In 2018, approximately 32,000 recreational water vessels were registered (not including kayaks and stand-up paddleboards), a figure expected to grow to almost 50,000 by 2031. And with tourist visits for the purpose of water related activities doubling in the past ten years and predicted to reach at least six million by 2030, the risks for both whales and humans are now substantial and need to be monitored and managed carefully.
Torre-Williams says jet ski water users in the bay sometimes drive right up to mothers and calves trying to get selfies. “We know now the rule is to be three hundred metres back, but that is not happening… the whales are surrounded by boats, more than three boats in the caution zone, and the jet skis are coming in at great speeds,” she says.
A proposed cruise ship terminal “right where the calves and their mothers are resting” presents another concern, along with shark nets which (unlike in NSW) remain in place during the whole migration period. When I asked Nicola Beynon from Australia’s Humane Society about the dangers of shark nets for whales, she told me:
“Whales are routinely caught in the shark control nets and even when released alive undergo significant trauma, including mothers or calves who witness it, and will often suffer injuries. When we have more effective technology for protecting swimmers today, it is unethical to persist with this harmful outdated culling method.”
Torre-Williams wants the Gold Coast, and potentially other areas where newborns are sighted, recognised as calving habitat.
“If it was recognised that places other than the Great Barrier Reef are calving habitats then we could perhaps get a code of conduct in place, particularly for recreational boats and jet skis, and alongside of that a lot of education and awareness raising.”
Without taking into account what thousands of years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories might also tell us, newborn sightings have previously been documented in various locations and at unusual times along Australian whale migration routes. And as Wally Franklin noted during the conference, “it’s pretty clear from the established literature that the primary birthing area is still somewhere in that southern part of within the Great Barrier Reef lagoon,” for east coast humpbacks.
But when I ask Franklin if more protection is now needed, he is clear: “All calving areas have got to be looked at, if they’re not protected they should be.”
Dr Lyn Irvine from the University of Tasmania has been researching calving grounds on the Australian west coast and says the southward extension of calving on the east coast requires recognition and careful management.
“Identifying critical habitat such as calving grounds will become increasingly important in coming years as the humpback whale population continues to grow and potentially overlap with human activities.”
Murdoch University researcher, Dr Joshua Smith, has recently studied worldwide birthing events of humpback whales, and expressed a similar view when I contacted him. “If we don’t get too caught up about whether we call them calving grounds or not, if critical life history events are occurring in certain places such as females giving birth, then protections do need to be afforded to these animals and appropriate legislation needs to reflect that,” he said.
Swim-with-whale tourism, recently introduced with humpbacks in Australia, was also discussed at the conference, sometimes heatedly. While research has shown that both watching and swimming with whales can impact negatively on populations, a case continues to be made for heavily regulated whale watching operations - citizen science from whale watching provides important research data, seeing whales in the wild increases anti-captivity advocacy, and our up close connection with whales makes it “personal” and leads to better understanding and louder calls for their protection.
Australian whale watching regulations and the number of licences issued varies by state and location. Ten licences are currently in use in Hervey Bay, down from more than twenty in earlier years. On the Gold Coast the number is four. And while regulation breaches in various locations have been reported, there is general acceptance that operators “mostly” work within guidelines and play an important role in monitoring and modelling behaviour for private recreational users.
But the case for pushing further into a whale’s domain, by inserting our bodies into the water, was not supported by many at the conference. The argument put forward, mostly by attendees involved in swim operations, was that because the activity was so meaningful for customers it should be allowed, if done respectfully. But others were unconvinced and the question of “what is in it for the whales” remained largely unanswered.
A number of researchers discussed the disruptions to whales at France’s Reunion Island in the Mascarene Archipelago, where enforcing whale tourism regulations has proved difficult. Footage shown by researcher Stephanie Sorby of a whale slapping its tail in response to nearby swimmers, drew gasps from the room.
Another online video from Reunion Island shows a mother with a calf slapping her tail at a diver. “It’s a clear signal and coming from a thirty tonne animal, it can result in fatal accidents,” Ludovic Hoarau, from the Centre d’Etude et de Découverte des Tortues Marines (CEDTM) research and protection centre, said at the time.
At the Hervey Bay conference, presenters from CEDTM discussed their recent Reunion Island research that showed short term negative effects on humpback whales leading to safety issues for humans.
“Resting, along with nursing behaviours of humpback whales, were disrupted significantly by whale-watching activities,” Hoarau, who leads the Quietude Mission to monitor and educate sea users in respectful behaviours, told me. “Humpback whales tended to avoid vessels and swimmers, especially when behaviour was intrusive or not compliant with the charter,” he said.
But Hoarau also noted the “positive humpback whale responses” that were “more likely to occur” when recommendations of the Réunion Island code-of-conduct (Charter) were followed scrupulously.
Keynote speakers, Drs Wally and Trish Franklin, have been researching whales in Hervey Bay for the past 30 years, and were deeply disturbed by swim-with-whale research presented at the conference, particularly the recent Vava’u Tonga study by Auckland University of Technology researcher Lorenzo Fiori.
“The crucial focal point that occurred at one stage at this conference was the research presented by Lorenzo Fiori. We were aware that there was a recent publication by Lorenzo, we got it just before we came up so we hadn’t had time to read it carefully. But in his presentation he showed us the results and those results are devastating, showing a clear impact upon the relationship between a mother and calf,” Wally Franklin told me on the sidelines of the conference.
Professor Michael Lück, from the School of Hospitality and Tourism at the AUT university, was one of a number who left the conference with a changed view on swim-with-whale tourism:
“If it’s managed properly it’s not such a big issue, but especially over the few days here I changed my mind about it. It’s not necessary and seeing the data that came out of Lorenzo’s study that is so, so important. My question is always, is it necessary, is it really necessary?”
Commercial swim activities in Vava’u started in the early 90s and by 2017, eighteen operators were offering swim-with-whale encounters. The number has increased to twenty-two in 2019. Fiori’s research - “the first assessment of humpback whales’ behavioural responses to vessel and swimmer approaches in Vava’u” - found that the intensive activities caused disturbance to the natural behaviour patterns of the whales. The study paper also points to “widespread concern amongst the scientific community that swim-with-cetaceans tourism can disrupt vital behaviours and cause avoidance responses in the targeted cetaceans.”
Professor Mark Orams, another of the keynote speakers, was involved in supervising Fiori’s study:
“The results of the study are quite sobering. The evidence is clear. The swim-with-whales activities in Vava’u are disturbing mother calf pairs and that of course is a sobering result, but not surprising for anyone who has been associated with the industry up there for a period of time,” he told the conference.
Pacific Whale Foundation, an international non-profit organisation, has been researching whales in Hervey Bay since the 1980's and last year began a study of swim-with-whale activities in the area - seen as a “very popular product” by the Queensland government - with results likely to be published in 2021.
“In this area, swim-with-whales tourism was just introduced and it’s expanding in Australia and all around the world without research keeping up with the growth of that industry,” chief biologist Stephanie Stack told the conference. “Short term behavioural changes can have long term consequences. And right now there’s been no research on the impact of swim-with-whales tourism in this particular region,” she said.
Wally and Trish Franklin would like to see a possible move to not have swim-with in the Great Sandy Marine Park (Hervey Bay region) because of the area’s critical importance “to the social development of young whales and to the survival and social development of the calves.”
“It’s very much a female area and when the females come in, a lot of the time, sixty-nine percent of the time, they’re alone with their calves, and they’re nurturing and feeding, training them with different activities,” Trish Franklin tells me. “And the other group that is very important is the young ones because all the females also mix with the sub adults,” she says.
The safety of humans entering the water has also weighed heavily on Trish and Wally:
“There is incredible risk to the public when you put them in the water with a wild creature in its own domain. We hear people saying, oh but the whales have a wonderful awareness of spacial relationships… but the first time there is an occurrence, an accident - and it has occurred and it will occur - who’s going to get the blame? It won’t be the human beings in the water, it will be the whales,” says Wally.
The introduction of swim-with-whale tourism in Australia, now promoted as a safe activity, has in itself resulted in dangerous recreational behaviours not easily policed or managed in large waterways. Reports have come from numerous locations, including Hervey Bay, of disruptive jet skiers jumping into the water and more people paddling out directly to whales, trying to have a swim experience without paying an operator. One person at the conference told the room:
“We need to be really aware that the message we’re promoting as an industry is that a lot more goes into it than picking the right animals on the right day, picking the right weather conditions, a lot more to be considered before people wildly jump into the water for an experience.”
Sophie Lewis, from the World Cetacean Alliance (WCA) who ran the conference, noted that although WCA has a stance of trying to improve standards of swim-with operations, “I have to say that not all of our partners agree with that and there are still many partners in the WCA that do not approve of swimming with cetaceans in the wild.”
Orams told the conference that we need to stop thinking about it in terms of what it means to us and instead focus on what it must feel like for the whales.
“People who started the swim-with industry in Vava’u in the late 1990's had passion, care and respect. But now twenty years later we have clear evidence of substantial disturbance especially to mother calf pairs… We hear stories over and over again of this kind of development creep which ends up in a situation that is disadvantageous for the whales,” he said.
Orams also noted the recent New Zealand decision to ban swimming with dolphins in the Bay of Islands after research showed detrimental impacts on the dolphin population.
“That’s a very courageous, and a very controversial, but a very right decision. And that’s the sort of courage I think we need when we discover that what we are doing is having a negative impact, to have the courage collectively to call it out and change what we do.”
But courage is often lacking. In Western Australia, for example, dolphin feeding continues despite growing evidence of negative effects on the dolphin population. A recent study by Murdoch University researcher Valeria Senigaglia on bottlenose dolphins in Bunbury found that feeding dolphins negatively affects calf survival and female reproductive success in bottlenose dolphins even when conducted under state-issued permits.
In another recent paper, Senigaglia and co-researchers point to the conundrum - also at the heart of whale tourism generally - when “a conscientious tourism operation’s business model relies upon carefully managed and regulated practices that promote dolphin welfare and conservation, but that may also have detrimental long term impacts on the very species they rely upon for business and are seeking to conserve.”
Keynote speaker, Dr Paul Forestell, who has been coming to Hervey Bay with Pacific Whale Foundation and advocating for the protection of whales since the 1980s, says:
“I think the best thing that we can do is kind of follow the Hippocratic do no harm, and whatever you’re doing if you try to do it in a fashion that you believe generates no harm and then somebody comes along and shows you that no there is this harm or that harm, you’ve got to change your behaviour.”
Also discussed at the conference was the widespread exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from whale tourism operating on their lands. Earlier this year the Queensland Government partnered with the Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation (QYAC) to launch Australia’s first Aboriginal owned and operated whale watching operation on the Brisbane River. But in other areas of Queensland and around Australia, Aboriginal people remain excluded.
On the first morning of the Hervey Bay conference, local Butchulla elder Glen Miller made a strong and respectful statement on the subject and his words resonated with many in the room.
“You could tell by the reaction of people in the room that we all needed to hear that,” Forestell later told me. “I do think that as an industry, whale and dolphin watching has not demonstrated sufficient awareness of, or commitment to, the incorporation of First Nations or Indigenous viewpoints and cultural concerns as they’ve brought the product - that is access to the whale or dolphin - to the rest of the world. And I think, I really do think, we need to reconsider how to do more partnering.”
Since creation, Butchulla people of the Hervey Bay and surrounding region have lived by three lores - what is good for the land comes first, do not take or touch anything that does not belong to you, if you have plenty you must share. On nearby K’Gari (Fraser Island), Aboriginal people from other language groups used to gather each Winter to share the bountiful fish arriving around the island. Visitors were welcomed, but they entered only after Butchulla elders had invited them in.
With awareness growing of past and current injustices to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and tourists generally seeking more ethical tourism experiences, attention now needs to turn to traditional custodians who have long understood and respected the oceans and lands now facing destruction. It is past time for First Nations people to have a greater involvement in what happens in their country. It is long past time that they were heard.
Towards the end of the conference young locals were given a chance to speak. A powerful address from grade 9 student Ashanti Schiemer - a proud young Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman - reminded the room of Indigenous connections going back thousands of years, of a ‘living’ culture “based on respect and honour for all living things, in the circle of life.”
“First Nation people all along the eastern coast of Australia from the Torres Strait to Tasmania will all have a connection to the whales and their migration in some way,” Ashanti told the conference, noting the need for “more cultural understanding and education on whale watching boats to help tourists and visitors learn of the connections.”
The presence of whales “can signify a change in the seasons which can identify which food source is available,” she said. “When it is right to eat foods, when foods cannot be eaten, when it is time to attend ceremonies… For some groups they may be a totem and are protected and sacred… It is our life-long responsibility to protect them and the environment in which they live, we are spiritually connected.”
Ashanti also warned against “the need and greed for profits” at the expense of environmental protection and care. “The belief that it is ‘not our problem’, ‘money is more important’ and ‘progress’ have seen huge devastating impact on the land and our water ways,” she said.
“No matter what race or religion you are, it is vital that our Earth is looked after. It provides us with everything we need and it is our responsibility to take care of it or it will stop providing for us.”
Warming and increasingly acidic oceans, our intrusions into marine environments, our disrespect and disconnection when prioritising our own desires ahead of another creature’s needs - all create enormous threats for the whales many now claim to love and the ecosystems we depend on. If we don’t stop, if we don’t look carefully at the real and potential consequences of our actions, if we don’t listen to thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge built on nurturing and protecting rather than exploiting and destroying, the results will likely be catastrophic for whales and for the human beings who once came close to harpooning them out of existence.
