The study site
The archipelago of Bocas del Toro is located on the Caribbean coast of Panama. The archipelago consists of shallow and clear waters less than 20m in depth with coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows surrounding several islands. The main mode of transportation between the mainland and the islands is by boat. There are three taxi-boat companies that run every 30 minutes each way between the mainland in Almirante and the archipelago from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m (blue dotted line in the figure). Another highly transited area is Bocastorito’s Bay, also known as Dolphin Bay. Tour companies offer one-day tours around the archipelago, and one of the highlights is dolphin watching in Dolphin Bay between 9 a.m. to2 p.m. every day. This picture shows a typical aggregation of tour boats inside Dolphin Bay.
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betzi perez
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laura j may colladoThe resident dolphins
Although bottlenose dolphins are found throughout the archipelago, Dolphin Bay is their most valuable habitat. The bay is a semi-closed area that protects females and their calves against predators, providing a safe place for resting and finding prey. Dolphin Bay also serves as a place for social activities for more than 50% of the dolphins in the archipelago (May-Collado et al., 2017). Like many ‘inshore’ populations the Bocas bottlenose dolphin population is genetically isolated, small (effective population size N=73 individuals), and both males and females show high levels of habitat fidelity (Barragan-Barrera et al., 2017). It is the predictability of these dolphins within Dolphin Bay that has fueled the dolphin-watching activities in this area.
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laura j may colladoBetween 2006 and 2007 the dolphins of Bocas del Toro were in the headlines of newspapers and online news. The government at the time had given permission to a private company to extract dolphins from this population to be sold for entertainment. The premise was that this dolphin population was likely connected to offshore populations and thus extracting dolphins from this area would not impact the population. At the time our research team had collected photographs of the natural marks on the dolphin's dorsal fins to estimate population size using capture-recapture models. The population was estimated to be between 88–15o dolphins, extraction of 85 animals (as proposed) would have severely impacted this population. Furthermore, our genetic studies rejected the premise that this was part of an open population. We found a high degree of genetic isolation from neighboring coastal and oceanic populations. Soon after the government canceled the extraction, the dolphins became a novel attraction and marketing of tours to Dolphin Bay grew more rapidly than the training required to develop sustainable dolphin watching activities.
By 2012, the number of tour-boats inside the bay simultaneously was up to 40 boats. The increase in the number of boats resulted in competition for close access to the dolphins (Sitar et al., 2016). This resulted in aggressive interactions between boat operators and the dolphins, which disrupted important behaviors like foraging (Kassamali-Fox et al., 2019) and caused injury and death (Trejos-Lasso and May-Collado, 2015). Due to the intensity of the situation the International Whale Commission “expressed concern over the impacts of ineffectively managed dolphin watching in Bocas del Toro, on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and recommended continued monitoring of the impacts of dolphin watching activities on this population (IWC, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019)” to the government of Panama and highlighted this case study in their Whale Watching Handbook.
In collaboration with Mi Ambiente and the Universidad Maritima Internacional de Panama, we have offered workshops to educate dolphin watching tour operators. Unfortunately, the high turnover of tour-boat captains has made it difficult to generate consistency in compliance with regulations. A lingering problem is that anyone that moves to Bocas can start a tour-company because licensing for dolphin-watching activities is not required, and compliance with regulations in situ is not enforced by the government. Up until now, our workshops have had little impact and the number of boats has continued to increase. This has resulted in an increase in the noise levels generated by the boats in a critical dolphin habitat, which is likely to negatively affect the long-term health of this dolphin population.
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laura j may collado
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Photo credit:
Betzi Perez
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laura may collado