Tonga is one of the few places in the world where tourists can swim with humpback whales bringing in millions of dollars for the island kingdom.<\/p>\n
The whale watching industry is booming but local operators accuse some foreign businesses of breaking the rules and getting too close to the animals.<\/p>\n
They’re also worried the government is handing out too many licenses putting the whales and their breeding grounds at risk.<\/p>\n
One operator, Alistair Coldrick, is part of a group that has challenged the government in court on the license issue, arguing regulations are not being followed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt says that it should be in the interest and conservation, management or protection of the whales that a license be issued,\u201d he said. \u201cSo clearly throwing more and more licenses out there is gonna apply more and more pressure to the whales.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tonga is one of the few places in the world where tourists can swim with humpback whales bringing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[96170,61,60,5596,82,48116,13702,4380,263],"class_list":["post-669529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-humpback-whales","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-podcast","tag-science","tag-whale-breeding","tag-whale-watching","tag-whales","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}