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":645534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[31718,111,139,69,3800,147,55901,17971,28975,406],"class_list":["post-645533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-humpback-whales","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-podcast","tag-science","tag-whale-breeding","tag-whale-watching","tag-whales","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}