Whale watching in Ojo de Liebre, Mexico

A pragmatic approach to provide Mexican authorities the technical information they need to justify the establishment of a maximum number of whale-watching boats in the lagoon Ojo de Liebre, Mexico

Our approach entailed carrying out computational experiments through exploratory modelling, a technique to depict how a system would behave if a set of formal conjectures were correct. We explored two management strategies: a laissez-faire ―where the market places the limit of whale watching boats― versus a government intervention ―where the government regulates the number of whale-watching boats. We compared the outcomes of each management strategy in relation to a threshold that highlighted the potential biological consequences of whale watching activities on the Eastern gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) abundance in Ojo de Liebre