Mexico bans captive dolphin shows based on GCRA’s water pollution studies
by Tom Goreau | Jun 28, 2025 |
Much of this results from shocking recent cases of dolphin self harm indicating severe stress caused by captivity, which has galvanized animal rights activists.
Here we outline the little-known history behind this important environmental event. Mexican marine parks are visited by millions of tourists a year, and all users of the Marine Park waters pay a fee for their use (indirectly as part of their tickets and bills) which local companies selling services or goods send to the Hacienda, the Ministry of Finance, which is legally mandated to be used to support the management of the National Marine Protected Areas. Since the money vanished in Mexico City, and almost none funded the Parks themselves, Park managers hit on the stratagem of selling Use Rights to Marine Park waters for dolphin and marine animal tourism operators for large sums in order to cover expenses for Marine Park salaries, offices, and operations.
Mexican captive dolphin operations make millions of dollars a year in profits due to the large number of tourists and high fees, and rely almost entirely on cruise ship passengers, so this turned out to be lucrative for captive dolphin operators, the Marine Park, and the cruise ships, which get large kickbacks from tours guided from the piers, the “five minutes that will change your life forever” for just a few hundred dollars!
The Mexican Government passed laws saying that marine life in National Marine Parks should not be fed (as is done in the Bahamas and elsewhere to attract sharks for tourist photographs of feeding frenzies) and that exotic species could not be introduced. Mexican dolphinariums were unable to source native Caribbean dolphins because they are largely protected species, so they turned to Pacfic dolphins instead.
A Canadian lawyer promoting a tourism resort in the Solomon Islands paid a local village to trap a pod of hundreds of dolphins in a bay with nets in order to sell them to dolphinariums to raise capital. The dolphins were so densely confined that many drowned because they could not get to the surface to breathe. Hundreds of survivors were sold abroad, and many of them were brought to Mexico, and ended up in the captive dolphinariums in the Caribbean, clearly violating the law, since all were in National Marine Parks.
A local group of environmental activists in Cancun, led by Araceli Dominguez, led protests demanding that the law be enforced and the Pacific dolphins be removed from Caribbean National Marine Parks. She was thrown in jail for leading the protests, while the law was not enforced until her legal appeals reached the Mexican Supreme Court. The court ruled on a technicality, basically saying that since they couldn’t tell the difference between a Caribbean and a Pacific dolphin, there was no way to prove the law had been violated. The dolphinariums continued to operate at full capacity, with more being added, and strong pressure being placed on other cruise ship destinations to demand that they needed to have captive dolphin operations too, or the cruise ships would stop coming. In island after island, all around the Caribbean, local environmental groups said that their dolphins were protected, and that captive dolphin operations on their island wouild result in them all being captured and sold to unscrupolous tourism operators. Several Caribbean dolphin activists protesting such proposed operations were murdered.
A later Mexican Federal Law specifically banned the “Importation, Exportation, and Re-Exportation of marine mammals, including dolphins and sea lions” from Mexico. The day after the law was passed, hundreds of Pacific dolphins were exported from Mexico to dolphinariums across the Caribbean, because they knew Federal Laws take one day before they take effect.
In 1997 I assessed the health of coral reefs at Puerto Morelos with regard to spreading coral diseases (with Prof. Robert K. Trench and Maya Goreau), and at the request of the Mexican National Marine Parks of Isla Mujeres-Cancun, and of Nationaol Marine Park of Cozumel, started assessing reef health and restoration needs. Reefs were found to be severely stressed, primarily being smothered by algae over-fertilized from inadequately sewage. Solar-powered Biorock coral and lobster habitat projects were started, with great success. While installing the projects and training the Marine Park team, headed by their Marine Biologist, Gerardo Garcia, I met Araceli Dominguez in Cancun and learned about the dolphin situation.
I showed the oldest underwater photographs of Cozumel in the 1960s to the oldest underwater divers there, who could identify every spot, and I compared the old photos to the present conditions. The changes, as everywhere, have been shocking, and as always, have been denied by those causing them. So when divers on Cozumel noticed that algae were suddenly starting smothering the reefs they dived on every day, they asked me to look at the sites to see what the cause might be. I swam for kilometers along the coast and was able to track the seaweed infestation directly to the source, which turned out to be the captive dolphin pens. You can see video of the algae on either side of dolphin pens in Cozumel and Isla Mujeres in the short documentary film Tourism, Water Quality, and Reef Health.
I went immediately to the heads of the local National Marine Parks to let them know there was a problem. They asked if I had told anyone, and I said not yet, because I wanted them to know first. They told me that I was not allowed to speak about it, as it was a political matter, not a scientific one. When word came out from the divers who helped me reached the local press, the Marine Park cancelled years of successful Biorock reef restoration projects, and removed the solar panels I had brought (which had been recycled from the world’s first large solar power plant, in northern Michigan, commissioned by Jimmy Carter during the 1970s oil price crisis, and which worked perfectly until Reagan cut it apart for scrap, allowing me to buy the last panels at a salvage price, to use for the project).
My work on pollution caused by captive dolphins became known to Mexican marine mammal protection groups, who invited me to speak at the 2016 International Conference on the Captive Dolphin Industry in Mexico and the Caribbean, showing how captive marine mammal operations were not just bad for the animals, it was also causing pollution killing coral reefs that was bad for the environment and for tourism:
DOLPHIN-CONFERENCE-2016
This victory belongs to Araceli and all the Mexican marine mammal groups. The Global Coral Reef Alliance is proud to have a hand in supporting their efforts with evidence from the coral reefs.
