A decade of peer-reviewed research and a protection law barely a year old point to two very different answers on how to see the world’s biggest fish responsibly.
Ninety-three percent. That is the proportion of tourists at Oslob, in southern Cebu, who were found swimming closer to a whale shark than the town’s own ordinance allows. It comes from a study conducted by the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines, known as LAMAVE, published in the Royal Society’s own journal in December 2020, and it is not a fringe complaint from a single disgruntled diver. It is the conclusion of 358 in-water surveys carried out over two years by LAMAVE, the organisation that has run the longest continuous whale shark monitoring programme at the site. Their finding was blunt: whale sharks at Oslob had measurably changed their natural behaviour in response to daily hand-feeding, becoming markedly less likely to avoid boats and human contact the more times they had visited the feeding site.
Four hundred kilometres away, on the southern tip of Leyte, a different model has been quietly building for over a decade. No feeding. No guarantee. A community cooperative rather than a fisherman’s association turned tourism operator. And, as of last August, a new national law protecting the waters the sharks actually depend on. Both places are chasing the same animal. Only one of them is doing it in a way the science can defend.
What the feeding actually does to the sharks
Oslob’s whale shark tourism started in 2011, when fishers in the barangay of Tan-awan began feeding the animals small shrimp, called uyap, to stop them tearing through their nets. Tourists noticed. What began as an accidental discovery of tourism potential became, within a few years, the largest non-captive provisioned whale shark site on Earth, drawing more than half a million visitors annually and generating an estimated eighteen million US dollars in its first five years alone. Sixty percent of that income goes to the local fishers’ association, a genuine and significant transfer of wealth into a community that was, by most accounts, extremely poor before 2011.
The cost sits with the sharks. LAMAVE’s long-term monitoring, running from 2012 to 2020, documented anthropogenic scarring, injuries caused by boat contact and human interference, on ninety-five percent of the whale sharks identified at Oslob, compared with twenty-seven percent of the population studied in Australia, where no feeding takes place. A separate LAMAVE study tracking individual sharks over three years found that nine of them had become full-time residents, effectively abandoning the migratory behaviour that defines the species, a direct response to the reliability of the food source. Independent marine scientists have been equally clear in more recent reporting: when a four-day gap in sightings hit Oslob in May this year, biologist Mylene Sadagnot and researcher Kristina Luz Tapales both warned that habituating an endangered, highly mobile species to associate boats with food leaves it dangerously exposed once it moves beyond the protected interaction zone, where poaching remains a real risk.
None of this makes Oslob a simple villain. Tan-awan’s shift from a subsistence fishing community into a town with stable incomes, healthcare and education is real, and it happened because the whale sharks stayed close enough to reliably show up. That is precisely the trade-off: predictability for the tourist, engineered at a cost the sharks did not choose.
Oslob’s interaction area can see 800 to 900 visitors a day in peak season, with weekend numbers regularly passing 1,000. Photo credit: Inga Conti-Jerpe
Bohol tightened its rules. Leyte never allowed feeding at all.
Asia Unmasked has covered part of this story before. When Bohol suspended all whale shark interaction activity across Lila, Alburquerque and Dauis in early 2025 following reports of unregulated feeding, and returned sixteen months later with a strict new permitting system under the Enhanced Sustainable Marine Wildlife Interaction Ordinance, we wrote about what that meant for visitors planning a trip. That was progress: feeding banned outright, zoned interaction areas, mandatory guides, capped group sizes. But it is still, fundamentally, a managed interaction model built around guaranteeing an encounter within defined limits.
Pintuyan, a small municipality on Panaon Island in Southern Leyte, never had feeding to ban in the first place. Sogod Bay’s whale sharks have been drawing researchers since 2012, when LAMAVE ran an exploratory survey and found the population that would become one of its longest-running study sites. What developed alongside the research was not a fisherman’s cooperative competing for tourist boats, but KASAKA, a community organisation authorised by the local government to manage the entire operation: trained spotters who scan the water from paddle boats, certified guides who brief every visitor on the interaction rules before anyone gets in the water, and a strict no-feeding, no-touching policy enforced with the threat of an outright ban on offending boat operators. Pintuyan’s mayor, Ricarte Estrella, has been open about the town’s model being deliberately built on Donsol, the original Philippine whale shark site and the one WWF Philippines still holds up as the country’s benchmark for ethical interaction. He has said the town set out to copy an approach that “doesn’t rely on feeding,” while acknowledging Pintuyan remains far smaller in scale than either Oslob or Donsol and is content to build slowly rather than chase visitor numbers.
The numbers back up that patience. Visitor arrivals in Pintuyan climbed from 2,040 in 2023 to 9,842 in the 2026 season, a real and growing tourism economy, but one still small enough that the local tourism office closed the entire operation on the first of June this year, on schedule, to let the sharks migrate undisturbed and the ecosystem recover before the next season opens on the first of October. There is no equivalent pause at Oslob, where the interaction area now runs daily, year-round.
A protected seascape less than a year old
What makes this the right moment to write about Pintuyan, rather than simply another entry in the ongoing Oslob-versus-Donsol debate, is what happened last August. On the 29th, one day before International Whale Shark Day, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr signed Republic Act No. 12238, formally declaring the waters around Panaon Island, encompassing Pintuyan and the neighbouring municipalities of Liloan, San Francisco and San Ricardo, a protected seascape under the National Integrated Protected Areas System. The law covers more than 61,000 hectares and was the product of years of work by LAMAVE, the marine conservation group Oceana, and local communities who had spent over a decade building the case for it. Researchers have now identified more than 350 individual whale sharks using the waters of Panaon Island, one of the richest concentrations of the species anywhere in the country.
The legislation is not symbolic. It establishes a dedicated management board, a trust fund for conservation and enforcement, and, notably, a mandate for the Philippine Coast Guard to regulate vessel speed limits around the island specifically to protect whale sharks and other large marine species along their migratory paths. It is the kind of structural protection that Oslob, for all its tourism revenue, has never had built around it.
The waters around Panaon Island, including Pintuyan, became a protected seascape in August 2025. Photo credit: Together for the Ocean
The honest trade-off
None of this means Pintuyan is simply the better choice for every visitor, and it would be dishonest to write it up as one. Oslob’s whole appeal, ethically troubling as its methods are, is certainty: turn up between six and ten in the morning and you will very likely see a whale shark, because the operation is built to guarantee it. Pintuyan cannot make that promise. The sharks move freely through Sogod Bay, and travellers who have made the long journey out to Panaon Island have occasionally waited two or three days for a sighting. That unpredictability is not a flaw in the system. It is the entire point of not feeding a wild animal into staying put. Anyone booking a trip on the promise of a guaranteed encounter should book Oslob and go in with eyes open about what makes that guarantee possible. Anyone willing to trade certainty for a genuinely wild encounter, and a clearer conscience about how it was arranged, has a real and improving alternative.
Getting there
Pintuyan is not an easy add-on to a Philippines itinerary, and that is part of what has kept it small. The most direct route is to fly into Tacloban, Leyte’s largest city, served by direct flights from both Manila and Cebu, then travel by bus or van via Sogod to Pintuyan, a connection that can take the better part of a day depending on how the onward buses line up. Travellers coming from Cebu or Bohol can take a ferry to Hilongos or Bato in Leyte and continue overland; accounts of total journey time vary considerably by connection, so it is worth building in a full day for this route rather than assuming a quick transfer. From Siargao, the route runs via ferry to Surigao, then a short crossing to San Ricardo, around twenty minutes from Pintuyan by tricycle.
Once in town, interactions are arranged directly through the Pintuyan Municipal Tourism Office, which coordinates KASAKA’s boats, spotters and guides; there is no need to book in advance through a third party, though contacting the tourism office ahead of a visit is sensible. The whale shark season runs from October to June, when seasonal plankton blooms draw the animals into Sogod Bay. Since 2024, Pintuyan has marked the season with its own Tiki-Tiki Festival, celebrating the animal the town nearly wiped out a generation ago and has since built its future around protecting instead.
The story of Pintuyan is not a tidy one. It took until 2011 for local fishers to stop viewing whale sharks as a net-tearing nuisance to be killed on sight, and the shift to stewardship came from recognising tourism potential rather than a sudden change of heart. But nearly three decades on from Donsol showing the country what an ethical model could look like, Pintuyan has built something worth genuinely supporting: a community-run operation, backed now by national law, that treats an endangered species as a reason to slow down rather than a resource to industrialise. Oslob proved that whale sharks are worth more to a coastal town alive than dead. Pintuyan is proving they are worth even more left wild.
Where to stay
Accommodation in Pintuyan itself is modest and dive-focused rather than resort-scale, which is part of why the town has stayed so quiet. Pintuyan Dive Resort, on Panaon Island, is run in the same spirit as the whale shark interaction it sits beside: no feeding, no manufactured encounters, a minimum two-day stay recommended to give guests a realistic chance of a sighting without the guarantee Oslob manufactures. Travellers wanting more choice can base themselves in Padre Burgos, on the other side of Panaon Island, and take the roughly hour-long boat crossing into Sogod Bay each day, a route at least one Padre Burgos operator already packages together with the transfer included.
Further reading, on responsible wildlife and conservation tourism across the region:
- Bohol’s new whale shark rules, and what they mean for visitors
- What conservation looks like when locals have a stake in it, from Vietnam, the Philippines and Timor-Leste
- Thailand’s elephant tourism, and how to visit without making it worse
For more on responsible wildlife tourism across Southeast Asia, follow Asia Unmasked on Facebook and X.
