“The last couple of years our trips have become totally disappointing.”
A whale-watching tour company in southwest Ireland has closed, saying that the waters, once teeming with cetaceans, have been overfished, depriving the whales and dolphins of food.
Colin Barnes, owner of the two-person, single-boat whale watching company Cork Whale Watch, announced on social media that he would no longer run the tours after some early-season tours saw no whales. Barnes, who started the company in 2001 after years of watching whales off Ireland’s west coast as a commercial fisherman, said that overfishing of sprat had depleted the food supply for whales and dolphins, causing them to migrate to other parts of the North Atlantic to search for food.
“All we have now in our search area is just a few minke whales and small groups of dolphins, and over the last couple of years our trips have become totally disappointing,” he notes in the post.
In a follow-up post, he explained that the company had gone on several trips earlier this spring, hoping there would be an improvement over the last year. However, he made the decision to close up shop after coming back from a trip with no sightings for the first time in eight years. He also noted that the oceanic birds he normally looks to as indicators of where a whale pod might be have also largely disappeared, and that the sprat on which the birds and whales prey were nowhere to be found.
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Previous trips had yielded abundant sightings of dolphins, minke, fin, and humpback whales feeding on local sprat populations. Sprat is a small fish that is fished for fishmeal to feed commercial fish farms.
The owner of nearby Atlantic Whale & Wildlife Tours also told The Guardian that whale populations in the area had plummeted, and also blamed overfishing.
Recent public meetings in West Cork have led to calls on the Irish Government to ban sprat fishing in Ireland’s inshore coastal waters beginning this fall. A previous government attempt to ban close-in sprat fishing was struck down by Irish courts.
The chief executive of the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organization has said that warming waters are what are driving the sprat away from Ireland’s coastal waters, saying that fishing takes further out at sea have risen sharply. He said that the organization has asked the Irish government for a full scientific assessment of Irish sprat populations so that the fishery can be sustainably managed.
Ireland currently imposes a quota on commercial harvests for many types of marine life, but does not have any limits on sprat. Regulators overseeing fishing in the North Sea between Great Britain and the Netherlands have recently vastly increased their own quota on sprat, citing populations exceeding historic averages.
Tourism Ireland notes that Ireland’s southwest isn’t the only part of the country where visitors can whale-watch. Noting that Ireland’s waters have been designated a whale and dolphin sanctuary since 1991, the site notes that visitors can also join whale-watching excursions in the counties of Clare and Donegal, both north of Cork.
Several coastal areas around the world are popular for whale-watching. Many larger whales are migratory, calving in the tropics during colder months near the poles, and heading north or south during those regions’ respective summers to feed. Feeding whales can be viewed in Alaska, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, and the cold waters of the US Pacific Coast. Calving whales can be viewed in the warm waters off Baja California, Mexico, the Azores, Hawai‘i, Tonga, Tahiti, and the Dominican Republic.
Whale populations reached their nadir in the 1960s when international agreements largely put a ban on commercial whaling. Most whale species have recovered significantly since that time, with many approaching pre-whaling levels. The NOAA Fisheries estimated in 2024 that whale populations had largely recovered, but that their climate change, including ocean heatwaves and migration of food sources, can affect populations and where they spend their feeding and calving seasons.
