A mixed-methods study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science collected immediate post-excursion self-reports from 47 adults following commercial whale-watching trips in southwest Tenerife, with short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) as the questionnaire’s focal species. The research, led by independent researcher Lavinia Mitchell, set out to examine what visitors find meaningful in these encounters and how different dimensions of the experience are reported together, a question that remains poorly understood despite whale watching’s growth as a global tourism activity.

The study was designed with the encounter at its centre. Five domains organised the evidence: participant background and prior context; encounter context and setting; emotional and relational responses; meaning and interpretation; and conservation-related self-reports. Participants completed a post-excursion questionnaire containing closed-response and open-text items, accessed through a QR code on their own devices between 7 and 17 March 2026. Quantitative data were summarised descriptively, with exploratory Spearman rank correlations, multiple-comparison correction and sensitivity analyses. Open-text responses were examined using hybrid deductive-inductive reflexive thematic analysis.

The emotional results were striking. Awe or wonder was reported by 44 of 47 participants, or 93.6 percent. Excitement followed at 91.5 percent, and curiosity at 89.1 percent. But empathy or concern was more variable, endorsed by only 59.6 percent of respondents. Participants commonly described pilot whales as social or family-oriented animals, with 34 of 46 respondents, or 73.9 percent, selecting that descriptor. Open-text accounts located meaning in perceived whale behaviour and sociality, free-ranging status, the ocean and sensory setting, and the human context of the excursion.

Support for whale protection and limits on tourism-related harm was high. Agreement reached 93.6 percent for stronger regulations to protect whales from disturbance, 93.6 percent for limits on whale-watching trips if the activity were harming whales, and 95.7 percent for a human duty to prevent tourism-related harm. Yet reports of thinking differently about whales were more mixed, with only 53.2 percent agreeing that the encounter made them think differently. Perceived influence on feelings about whale protection varied with several emotional and relational responses, but not clearly with perceived whale proximity.

That proximity finding is the study’s most provocative. When participants were asked which element most influenced their feelings about whale protection, seeing the whales up close was the most frequently selected influence, chosen by 22 of 46 respondents, or 47.8 percent. But neither reported physical proximity nor feeling close to the whales met the adjusted association criterion with perceived influence. In the exploratory correlation analysis, higher perceived-influence ratings tended to occur alongside higher ratings of empathy or concern, connection with nature, excitement, curiosity and awe or wonder, while calm, prior familiarity with pilot whales and both proximity measures did not show clear adjusted associations.

The open-text material helps explain the tension. Some participants emphasised the value of seeing free-ranging whales with space, at what they perceived to be a respectful distance and without disturbance. One participant wrote about seeing the whales with enough space to freely move around, as the boats were at a respectful distance. Another valued the fact that the animals were there of their own free will and not in captivity. For some participants, up close may therefore have reflected more than physical distance alone, potentially capturing the immediacy of being able to see or hear a free-ranging whale and attend to its movement and perceived behaviour.

The study is careful about what its findings do and do not show. The analyses identify exploratory patterns among concurrently collected responses, not evidence of attitudinal change, later behaviour or conservation outcomes. An emotion is not an attitude, a participant’s retrospective sense of influence is not measured change, and an intention is not behaviour. Stated intention is also an imperfect proxy for action, and the substantial intention-behaviour gap documented in psychological research means that what participants said they were more likely to support immediately after the excursion tells us little about whether they later acted on those intentions.

The limitations are equally clear. The sample was small and context-specific, recruited through non-probability convenience sampling, and a single post-excursion questionnaire cannot separate pre-existing values from responses associated with the encounter or show what persists over time. Several measures were researcher-developed single items, detailed information about specific excursions, vessel practices and whale responses was limited, and the qualitative material was brief. Responses may not have been fully independent because some participants may have been clustered within the same vessels, operators or individual excursions, and self-selection, the English-language questionnaire and socially desirable responding may also have influenced who participated and what was reported.

Yet the implications for management are significant. The findings do not support progressively closer approaches as a route to greater meaning or conservation relevance. Close observation was valued, but participants also valued free-ranging animals, space and perceived respectful distance. This matters because vessel presence and underwater noise have been associated with changes in cetacean behaviour and acoustic activity, and experimental approaches in the same area found that a louder vessel reduced the proportion of time mothers spent resting. The challenge, the study concludes, is not simply how close people can get to whales, but how meaningful encounters can occur while keeping the needs and welfare of the whales at their centre. Future work should combine visitor responses with independent measures of vessel practice and whale response, pairing what people find meaningful with what the animals actually experience.

Subject of Research: Whale-watching visitor experience and conservation responses in Tenerife

Article Title: Whale-watching encounters in Tenerife: an exploratory mixed-methods study of visitor experience, interpretation, and conservation-related responses

Article References: 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, 7, Article 1932374. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1932374

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1932374

Keywords: whale watching, pilot whales, Tenerife, conservation psychology, wildlife tourism, visitor experience, Whale-watching, encounters, exploratory, mixed-methods, visitor, experience

The research, led by Kat Douglas of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen together with Zahra Ebrahimi Monfared, Seyedhamed Mirkarimi, Adrian Paterson, and Mahmood Soofi, drew on face-to-face interviews with 292 residents across 30 villages lying within five kilometers of the park boundary. Interviews were conducted between April and November 2022 by two local field researchers, one male and one female, with 71 percent conducted in Turkmen and the remainder in Farsi. Respondents included livestock herders, crop farmers, beekeepers, teachers, and freelancers, reflecting the mixed livelihoods of a landscape where Turks, Kurds, Fars, Baluch, and Sistani communities live alongside some of Iran’s most threatened mammals.

Golestan National Park is a fitting laboratory for such questions. Established in 1957 as Iran’s first biosphere reserve, it covers roughly 91,895 hectares and rises from 450 to 2,411 meters, encompassing Hyrcanian temperate forest, steppe, and semi-arid habitats. The park shelters urial, bezoar goats, red deer, and roe deer, and with them the leopards, wolves, and bears that prey on them or, in the bear’s case, raid the crops and hives of surrounding farms. As human populations and agriculture have expanded through the Hyrcanian forests, negative interactions have intensified, and retaliatory or precautionary killing of carnivores remains a common response to livestock loss.

What sets this study apart is its analytical framework. Rather than treating attitudes as a simple product of economic damage, the team used Bayesian structural equation modelling, a statistical technique capable of estimating multiple direct and indirect pathways simultaneously among latent constructs such as beliefs, norms, and attitudes that cannot be measured directly. The workflow proceeded in two steps: first a confirmatory factor analysis verified that survey items reliably measured their intended constructs, with all retained items loading above 0.40 and reliability coefficients such as McDonald’s omega ranging from 0.78 to 0.83; then a structural model tested how cognitive beliefs, social beliefs, perceived management responsibility, and livestock loss shaped attitudes toward each species separately.

The headline finding is strikingly consistent. Across all three species, cognitive beliefs, the individual’s evaluations, knowledge, and perceptions of carnivores, emerged as the strongest and most reliable predictor of attitudes. For bears the standardized path coefficient reached negative 0.72, for wolves negative 0.63, and for leopards negative 0.48, with 95 percent Bayesian credible intervals that excluded zero in every case. Respondents who felt carnivore conservation was unimportant, or who believed that any carnivore attacking livestock should be killed, held markedly more negative attitudes overall. In other words, the mind, not the wallet, appears to be the primary battleground of coexistence.

Social beliefs, the expectations of family and fellow villagers about retaliatory killing, also pushed attitudes in a negative direction, though their direct effect was weaker and, in the leopard model, the credible interval overlapped zero. More intriguingly, social beliefs were positively associated with cognitive beliefs in all three models, suggesting that when peers endorse killing carnivores, individuals’ own perceptions of carnivores as dangerous are amplified. The authors caution that social desirability bias, in which respondents answer as they believe their community expects, may partly shape such patterns, a well-known hazard of attitudinal surveys. Even so, the indirect pathway points to a clear lever: shifting community-level norms could ripple through individual belief systems and soften attitudes toward predators.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result concerns livestock loss itself. Included as an observed variable in the leopard and wolf models, it showed only a weak, statistically uncertain relationship with attitudes, with coefficients near zero and credible intervals spanning zero. Reducing the material costs of coexistence, while still vital for household welfare, appears insufficient on its own to change how people feel about carnivores. The bear model dropped livestock loss entirely, a logical choice given that brown bears in northern Iran mainly raid orchards and beehives; one study found 44 percent of negative interactions involved orchards and 32 percent beehives, against just 13 percent livestock attacks. Notably, human-caused mortality records from Iran between 1980 and 2021 show bears were killed more often than wolves or leopards, but chiefly over threats to human life and crops rather than depredation of herds.

Perceived management responsibility added another layer of nuance. The belief that government should capture and relocate carnivores after an attack was associated with more positive attitudes, an effect that was statistically credible for leopards and wolves, though modest in magnitude. Yet in the wolf and bear models this same variable correlated with more negative cognitive beliefs, hinting that institutional expectations and personal belief systems operate somewhat independently. The context matters: in Iran, compensation schemes for wildlife damage are widely described as bureaucratic and rare, and the survey confirmed this, with only 1.7 percent of respondents, five people, reporting ever receiving compensation. Post-attack support limited by funding and paperwork is known to contribute to illegal retaliation.

Several hypothesized drivers refused to stay in the models. Emotions such as fear, pride, and happiness were removed after destabilizing the analysis, though exploratory estimates hinted that positive emotions favored positive attitudes. The authors suspect social desirability bias may be at play, since roughly half of respondents reported minimal fear of leopards, wolves, or bears, a pattern that could reflect genuine tolerance or reluctance to appear afraid. Demographics including age, gender, ethnicity, literacy, and occupation were also excluded, as were legal and participatory variables, the latter perhaps reflecting the fragmented legal framework surrounding conservation in Iran. Women were underrepresented at 16 percent of the sample, a limitation rooted in cultural barriers rather than sampling design, and the authors acknowledge that the final models were deliberately simple, with two items per construct.

The practical implications reach well beyond Golestan. Because cognitive beliefs dominate attitude formation, education programs that explain the ecological role of carnivores, recalibrate perceived danger toward realistic risk, and teach practical protection, from electric fencing and guardian dogs to fox lights and other non-lethal deterrents, may do more for coexistence than compensation checks alone. Because social norms feed individual beliefs, community-wide engagement rather than one-on-one persuasion is likely to be decisive. And because trust in management shapes attitudes, transparent, participatory governance deserves a place alongside any mitigation toolkit. The authors emphasize that their findings are local in origin but plausibly generalizable in mechanism, since belief systems, social norms, and institutional perceptions recur across human-carnivore contexts worldwide. Coexistence, this study suggests, is negotiated less in pastures and orchards than in the shared beliefs of the people who live there.

Subject of Research: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores around Golestan National Park, Iran

Article Title: Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes

Article References: Douglas, K., Monfared, Z. E., Mirkarimi, S., Paterson, A., & Soofi, M. (2026). Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Keywords: large carnivores, human-wildlife coexistence, Persian leopard, grey wolf, brown bear, Golestan National Park, conservation psychology, Bayesian structural equation modelling, social norms, cognitive beliefs, livestock depredation, Iran