A survey on tourist attitudes towards invertebrate conservation through entotourism activities in Sabah, Borneo of Malaysia

The Tabin Wildlife Reserve (TWR), Lahad Datu, Sabah is a popular tourist spot in Malaysia. It is the largest wildlife reserve in Sabah, mainly focusing on endangered mammals and birds. Thus, in this research, it is proposed to include invertebrates’ information in the current ecotourism activities in TWR. Implicitly, it could increase a sustainable invertebrate conservation. Invertebrates possess many benefits to humankind, namely waste recycling whereby, they cycle minerals and organic minerals for plants and animals. Thus, this investigation aimed to study the tourists’ perception on including invertebrate information in the current TWR ecotourism activity. Hence, to collect data from tourists, pre-visit and post-visit questionnaire surveys were adopted as the methodological approach during preliminary entotourism activities. Two different conceptual framework sets (pre-visit and post-visit) were posited in this investigation. The collected data were analysed via Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS) software program by adopting Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). SEM analyses revealed that both pre-visit and post-visit surveys have significant variance towards Ecotourism. This implied a good potential in including invertebrates in ecotourism activities especially in Sabah. The findings of this study are important to contribute to the literature of invertebrate conservation awareness in Sabah, since very limited researches were conducted specifically on entotourism field.