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Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on a multispecies ethnography in the Lagunas de Chacahua national park, I look at the migration of humpback whales and the ‘feral’ movements of Chacahua’s crocodiles to illuminate the rapidly changing entanglements of more-than-human lives, conservation and tourism within park territory.

Paper Abstract:

The Chacahua-Pastoria lagoons, one of Mexico’s oldest national parks on the Pacific coast, sustain a rich diversity of species and are home to Afro-Mexican, Chatino, and Mixtec communities, all facing escalating ecological pressures. Drawing on the (visual) multispecies ethnography I have carried out, I examine the migration paths of humpback whales along the Pacific coast and the ‘feral’ movements of Chacahua’s crocodiles to illuminate rapidly changing entanglements of more-than-human lives, conservation, and tourism within the park. The seasonal passage of humpback whales off Chacahua’s coast attracts increasing numbers of tourists who board boats for brief (and sometimes risky) encounters. This demand drives the development of trained professionals and technology: fishermen use their oceanic knowledge to become whale-watching captains, community monitors gather data and form ephemeral relationships with the whales, and AI-supported global projects track these migrations. The movements of Chacahua’s hybrid crocodiles, a ‘feral effect’ from interactions between the native Crocodylus acutus and Crocodylus moreletii escaped from a local cocodrilario, reshape crocodile populations and behaviours in the park. Human responses to these more-than-human movements raise questions about conservation and the role of a national park. I argue that seeing these movements as part of the pluriverse, a negotiation of heterogeneous worlds, is significant to understanding how different ontologies shape the multispecies relationships of the lagoon, where biological knowledge and the ontology of being tonal, sharing life with an animal, come together in a fluid negotiation of moving with more-than-human animals in Chacahua.