New paper: what visitors value in a whale-watching encounter
A study of what people take from meeting wild pilot whales off Tenerife has been published in Frontiers in Conservation Science. Its clearest result is a practical one: closer approaches are not what makes an encounter meaningful.
Research with whale-watching passengers in southwest Tenerife has been published in Frontiers in Conservation Science. It asked what people actually find meaningful when they meet wild pilot whales, and its clearest practical result is that getting the boat closer is not the answer. It is Lavinia Mitchell’s second published paper.
What the study asked
Whale watching is one of the main ways people encounter wild cetaceans, and it is often defended on the grounds that the experience builds public support for protecting them. Which part of the encounter does that work is far less clear: the animals themselves, how close the vessel gets, the setting, or the way the trip is guided and explained.
This study set out to describe what passengers report in the moments after a trip, across five areas: their own background and prior experience; the setting of the encounter; their emotional and relational responses; how they interpreted what they had seen; and what they said about conservation.
How it was done
Forty-seven adults took part, recruited from commercial excursions sailing out of Puerto Colón in Costa Adeje between 7 and 17 March 2026. Each completed a questionnaire on their own phone immediately after coming ashore, combining rating scales with open-text prompts. The focal species was the short-finned pilot whale, the resident population that is monitored year-round in these waters.
Responses were summarised descriptively, with exploratory Spearman rank correlations, a Benjamini–Hochberg correction for multiple comparisons, and sensitivity analyses. Eighty usable open-text answers were examined through reflexive thematic analysis.
What passengers reported
| Response | Reported by |
|---|---|
| Awe or wonder | 93.6% (44/47) |
| Excitement | 91.5% (43/47) |
| Curiosity | 89.1% (41/46) |
| Empathy or concern | 59.6% (28/47) |
| Described pilot whales as social or family-oriented | 73.9% (34/46) |
| Described pilot whales as intelligent | 54.3% |
| Supported whale protection and limits on tourism-related harm | 85.1–95.7% |
| Said the trip made them think differently | 53.2% |
| Chose seeing the whales up close as an influence | 47.8% (22/46) |
In the open answers, meaning sat in four places: the behaviour and sociality of the whales themselves, the fact that the animals were free-ranging, the ocean and the sensory setting, and the human context of the trip — who was on board and how the encounter was handled.
Why the proximity result matters
“Seeing the whales up close” was the single most frequently selected influence on how people felt about whale protection. Yet once the analysis accounted for multiple comparisons, how close passengers judged the vessel to have been showed no clear association with how much they felt the trip had influenced them. What did track were the emotional and relational responses: empathy, connection with nature, excitement, curiosity and awe.
The open answers pulled in the same direction. People valued that the whales were wild and unconfined, that they had space, and that the boat kept what passengers read as a respectful distance. Taken together, the findings give no support to progressively closer approaches as a route to a more meaningful trip or a stronger conservation response — which matters, because proximity is the pressure most often placed on operators by passengers and competitors alike.
What it means for the work here
MutatioMare’s work in these waters rests on photo-identification monitoring of the resident pilot whale population inside the Franja marina de Teno-Rasca Special Area of Conservation, alongside a whale-watching industry that operates all year. This paper adds the visitor side of that picture: evidence about what the people on those boats take away, collected at the same stretch of coast.
Its closing recommendation is one a monitoring programme already on the water is well placed to act on — pair what visitors report with independent measures of vessel practice and whale response, rather than treating either on its own as the measure of a responsible trip. The paper acknowledges Alejandra Carvallo Carrera, Senior Program Manager at MutatioMare, for support and local knowledge on the ground in Tenerife.
What the study does not claim
This is an exploratory, cross-sectional study: 47 passengers, one stretch of coast, eleven days, recruited as they became available rather than sampled at random.
The data are self-reports captured at a single moment immediately after the excursion. The correlations describe patterns among answers given at the same time. They are not evidence of attitude change, of later behaviour, or of conservation outcomes, and the author is explicit on that point. It is worth repeating wherever these figures are quoted.
Cite this paper
Mitchell, L. (2026). Whale-watching encounters in Tenerife: an exploratory mixed-methods study of visitor experience, interpretation, and conservation-related responses. Frontiers in Conservation Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1932374
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