Wildlife–Watching in Marine Environments

Abstract

If one looks at destination guide books from as late as the 1990s, very few would have had much to say about watching marine wildlife, except perhaps a few sentences about scuba-diving and the opportunity it gave the tourist to see interesting and beautiful fish as an added bonus for participating in this leisure activity. Otherwise, the tourist may have been recommended to visit a certain place because of the opportunities to fish for huge specimens that could be displayed as trophies and photographed to impress the folks back home. Yet, a few years later, marine wildlife-watching has become a major selling point for many coastal destinations around the world, from Australia to California, Sri Lanka to Alaska, South Africa to Scotland. Interestingly, it is also an activity, out of all of the ways in which tourism and the marine environment interacts, that has attracted perhaps the most attention by tourism researchers. In this chapter we will look at how and why this change occurred together with a look at the impacts of the rise of marine wildlife-watching in its many forms. However, first we need to be clear what we are talking about by looking at several typologies of marine wildlife-watching.