scuba divers – New video-based research suggests that most reef damage from scuba diving is accidental or simply unnoticed—revealing how “good” reef tourism can still harm ecosystems. Between December 2022 and January 2024, researchers recorded divers at sites across Indones
Underwater, it’s easy to believe you’re doing the right thing.
Scuba diving is often sold as a “good” way to use reefs: fish remain in the water. and divers get to see marine life up close without extracting it. But a new study tracking divers on video and comparing what they thought they were doing with what actually happened suggests the comfort is misplaced—and the reef pays the price.
More than 80 percent of damaging physical contact with the reef was unintended or simply unnoticed, the researchers report May 26 in Conservation Letters. The finding lands with particular force because it challenges a common assumption among people who enter the water carefully.
“Scuba diving is often framed as one of the ‘good’ ways to use reefs because it isn’t extractive,” says Bing Lin, a marine conservation scientist at the University of Sydney. “The fish remain in the water, and divers get to enjoy seeing them in the wild.”
What Lin and his colleagues argue is harder to see is how often reef damage happens despite that good intention.
“What’s less understood is just how invisible much of this damage is to the people causing the harm,” Lin says.
The team collected a rare kind of evidence—combining dive footage with divers’ own self-assessments. Between December 2022 and January 2024. they gathered both survey and dive video data from 732 scuba divers at dive sites across Indonesia and the Philippines. During the dives, the researchers filmed divers on the reef and logged behaviors when they touched or damaged corals. After the dives. the divers were interviewed and asked to estimate how often they contacted the reef and how their contact compared with other divers.
The mismatch was stark. On average, divers were touching the reef about one time per four minutes. About 60 percent of these touches were unintentional or done without the divers’ knowledge.
Lin describes what that means for the reef—and for the people who visit it. “Reef damage was pervasive, but usually not malicious,” he says.
The damage seems to come less from malice than from overconfidence and a limited sense of what’s happening in the moment. Roughly 75 percent of the divers rated themselves as above average in their diving abilities and avoidance of reef impacts. even though they were touching the reefs five times more than they’d estimated. Wildlife sightings also played a role: the rate of damaging contact more than doubled when divers bumped into wildlife.
On reefs that see heavy traffic—sites with thousands of divers and snorkelers per day—Lin warns that the accumulating impacts could have “substantial ecological impacts.”
Outside experts say the results also carry a note of hope, even if the numbers are unsettling. Fabio Favoretto, a marine ecologist at the University of Plymouth in England who was not involved with the research, points out that about 15 percent of divers never touched the reef at all.
“That’s the proof that this is fundamentally a fixable problem by training and regulation, not an inherent feature of diving,” Favoretto says.
He argues that the next step is making the science connect to what happens over time: do these behaviors translate into measurable declines in reef health? “What actually happens to a reef over five or 10 years if it’s touched once every four minutes?” Favoretto asks.
Both Favoretto and Lin also push back on a simplistic solution. “Hanging up the fins isn’t a solution,” Lin says.
Reef tourism, after all, is complicated. It plays an important role in conservation efforts and provides economic incentives to keep ecosystems intact. The goal, Lin stresses, isn’t to shut diving down.
“Ultimately, the goal is not to stop people from diving, but helping people dive better,” Lin says.
For reefs facing pressure from both climate and human activity, the study reframes what “careful” must mean: not just entering the water with respect, but training to reduce the contact that happens when no one realizes it’s happening.
coral reefs scuba diving marine conservation environmental studies diving behavior Conservation Letters Bing Lin University of Sydney Indonesia Philippines reef tourism