One Selfie Too Far

As if our marine wildlife wasn’t already subjected to enough human indifference about the impacts we cause it through selfish ignorance, we now have an example where it's being caused deliberately.

Back in 2019, tour operators in Mexico spotted a lucrative gap in the market. Thrill-seeking social media addicts, who had exhausted the possibilities of selfies with captive tigers and elephants, or wild penguins and sea lions, wanted to seek out a bigger prize – and what could earn you the biggest bragging rights – How about swimming with orcas…?

Although tourists have been swimming alongside whale sharks in Baja for some years, the industry is highly regulated, with government issued permits and enforced rules. But somewhere along the line, orcas got missed off the regulatory list.

And so now, every morning, a ramshackle fleet of up to 40 repurposed fishing boats streams out into the bay, guided by pilots in spotter planes, effectively directing them to the animals by sat-nav.

But now even some of the operators realise they’ve created a monster. “We thought it was a great thing at the beginning but it has become kind of a nightmare,” says Evans Baudin, the owner of Cabo Shark Experience who estimates he has taken 1,500 people to swim with orcas over the past nine years. “It’s completely out of control. Since there are no authorities or rules, anyone can do whatever they want.”

Marine biologists are dismayed at the situation. The orca pods in Baja are usually females with calves and are often feeding on mobula rays, sharks, dolphins, turtles or whales, while people are in the water alongside them. Orcas hunt using echolocation to find their prey, and the noise from the boat motors can disrupt their ability to capture food. In a situation like this, with operators lacking the knowledge needed to read a cetacean’s behaviour, and with excited, noisy tourists in the water, the risks are all too evident. Imagine an unlicensed operator with a group of tourists being allowed to interact directly with a pride of lions in the Serengeti in Africa and you have a not dissimilar scenario.

The good news is that the Mexican government is set to accept a plan put forward by conservationists to cap the numbers of tourist boats and to educate the captains and guides “..so they know when to interact with the animals, how to do so safely, and when to give the orcas space.”

While any moves to clamp down on this dreadful situation are to be welcomed, the bottom line for any operator is that if they don’t have boatloads of happy tourists then they don’t make money. And so the temptation to bend the rules just a little more than you know you should, is always there. And as for being able to make a judgement call about what constitutes safe interaction with orcas which gives them space, there are people who have spent their lives engaged in cetacean research who wouldn’t be able to tell you what that means.

A far more pragmatic approach would be to call time on the industry, which will get replaced at some future point by a new absurd fad. Let’s hope that is before someone gets injured and the orca gets the blame.