Sharks face significant welfare challenges in research settings including capture stress, tagging procedures, and captivity, while ecotourism encounters raise questions about provisioning and diver interaction stress.
Shark research and ecotourism welfare requires balancing the genuine conservation value of population data and public engagement with the welfare costs imposed on individual animals. Research tagging provides information essential for protection of declining species, but protocols must minimise capture stress, handling time, and post-release mortality. Welfare-conscious research design — using the least invasive tag type that provides adequate data, minimising handling time, avoiding air exposure, and monitoring post-release behaviour — is achievable without significantly compromising research value. Ecotourism provisioning welfare depends on assessment of whether altered behaviour from food provision constitutes meaningful welfare harm for individual sharks — a genuinely uncertain question that deserves honest engagement rather than dismissal.