GOOD GONE WILD
Sometimes, ecotourism hurts what it sets out to help
BY ERIC JAFFE
The island of Damas is a half-hour boat ride from
the Chilean coast. On the island, it’s dry and
rocky. The Humboldt penguins that live there
have no ice slopes to slide down in their black-
tie apparel. Instead, these desert penguins seek
out caves to shade their eggs from the sun. If they can’t
find a spot beneath a boulder, they may burrow into
seabird dung. Sometimes, they nest inside a cactus.
To see these penguins, visitors usually begin in La Serena, Chile.
They drive 40 miles north on a main highway and then cut toward
the coast on a gravel road that
leads to the fishing village of
Punta de Choros. Local fishermen there charge a fee to guide
the tourists to Damas by boat.
On the island, people are free to
walk into the caves where the
penguins live. Anyone can
watch a mother brooding an egg
and snap a picture with a flash
camera or a mobile phone.
What began in the early
1990s as a place with a few hundred curious visitors has now
become a tourism destination
that attracts 10,000 penguin
peepers a year. Damas provides
an example of ecotourism,
defined as the practice of visiting sites where exotic landscapes and rare animals are the
main attractions. Ideally, ecotourists learn about the habitats that
they visit, provide donations to conserve them, and generate income
for host communities.
Since this model of tourism emerged some 25 years ago, many
special-interest sites, like Damas, have experienced hikes in visitation. Often, ecotourism is a wild success (SN: 12/3/05, p. 364).
The United Nations even billed 2002 the “International Year of
Ecotourism.”
But several recent studies show a more complicated picture of
the impact of ecotourism, a practice that remains largely unregulated. The increased crowds lead to population changes in some
animals, such as the Humboldt penguin and, some 4,000 miles
away in the Bahamas, the Allen Cays rock iguana. A mounting
garbage problem caused by over-visitation by turtle viewers threatens the beaches of Tortuguero in Costa Rica. People who live near
Ghana’s Kakum National Park have lost access to the forest’s
resources and now suffer high rates of unemployment.
“There comes a time when you have so much interference through
ecotourism that you affect the thing you’re trying to protect,” says
Robert E. Hueter of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla.,
who studies ecotourism’s impact on whale sharks. Ecotourism’s
benefits to conservation and public education are considerable, he
says, but the downsides may take a long time to recognize.
“I think there’s been a glib … championing of ecotourism, that
it’s a win-win situation,” says Martha Honey, executive director of
the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. But by studying how animals, environments, and cultures respond to ecotourism, “we can set up systems that aren’t having adverse impacts,” she says.
FLIGHT OF THE PENGUINS Ursula Ellenberg decided to study
how human disturbance affects the Humboldt penguins when she
was quietly counting their population, but not quietly enough.
While she was looking through
binoculars from a cliff about 150
meters away, the penguins
began racing in all directions.
One of the penguins had spotted
Ellenberg, despite her unobtrusive perch. If a cautious
researcher can spark such a
reaction, she thought, how
would the penguins react to a
gaggle of shutter-happy
tourists?
To study the effects of
human-Humboldt interaction,
Ellenberg and her colleagues
measured the breeding success
of penguins on the islands of
Damas, Choros, and Chanaral,
which together make up the
Humboldt Penguin National Reserve. The island cluster serves as
a good point of comparison: Damas receives 10,000 annual visitors, but Choros and Chanaral are much less accessible from the
mainland and attract only 1,000 and 100 tourists a year, respectively.
Ellenberg’s team was the first to study these penguin populations.
The researchers monitored eggs and chicks on each island for 5
months after the penguin mothers laid the eggs. If a nest is abandoned during this period, the chicks usually die. Penguins have
many chances to breed during their 20-year life spans, and they
would sooner abandon a nest than risk personal harm—say, from
an approaching human.
In 2003, the only year that Ellenberg’s group studied Chanaral,
the penguins there bred an average of 1.34 chicks. On Choros, the
average was just below one chick in both 2002 and 2003. But on
Damas, female penguins produced, on average, a little less than
half a chick in 2002, and the birthrate dipped well below a quarter of a chick in 2003, Ellenberg’s team reports online and in the
November Biological Conservation.
T. MAT TERN
DESERTED ISLE — The population of Humboldt penguins (inset)
living on Damas has dwindled since ecotourism began there.
Researchers find that the Humboldt birth rates have fallen dramatically.
