The African penguin: Dressed for their own funerals?

Watching the penguins go about their business on Boulder’s Beach in Simon’s Town is an undisputed highlight of a visit to Cape Town — a city with no shortage of bucket list attractions. On land, the knee-high birds resemble miniature Charlie Chaplins, with their staccato waddle and bespoke tuxedos (each bird has a unique spot pattern on its breast). In the water they are transformed into majestic sea creatures that use their stunted wings to “fly” through the water with graceful ease.

The backdrop of powder-white sands, azure waters and fynbos-covered slopes completes the picture postcard. But if the penguin population continues to decline at current rates, the backdrop might soon be devoid of its main attraction.

On October 28 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the African penguin’s status on the red list of threatened species from endangered to critically endangered. (For context, the white rhino is not considered endangered, while the black rhino is critically endangered — although, unlike the African penguin, its population is increasing.)

The next category after critically endangered is extinct in the wild — a tragic outcome that  could be reached as early as 2035 for the African penguin.

“Losing the penguins would be a disaster as they are an indicator species for the entire ecosystem,” says Alistair McInnes, who heads the seabird conservation programme at BirdLife South Africa. At the root of the problem is the dramatic decline in sardine (and, to a lesser extent, anchovy) numbers off South Africa’s coast. Sardines are also important prey for endangered Cape gannets and Cape cormorants as well as several dolphin species, Bryde’s whales and important line-fish such as geelbek and snoek.

Losing the penguins would also be a major economic blow. According to a recently released report commissioned by the Endangered Wildlife Trust, the total annual value of South Africa’s penguin colonies was estimated to be between R613m  and R2.7bn (providing between 1,046 and 4,611 jobs) in 2023.

It is thought between 1.5-million and 3-million of the birds roamed the coastlines of Namibia and South Africa in 1900. That number has plummeted to 9,900 breeding pairs, or about 32,000 birds.

From the 1840s onwards, guano collection for the fertiliser industry had a devastating impact on seabird colonies the world over. Dassen Island, near Yzerfontein, used to be home to an estimated 1-million African penguins that nested in the 4m-6m layer of guano that coated the island. Now the guano is gone and just 2,040 pairs used the island in the 2023 breeding season.

What’s more, between 1920 and 1969, a taste for penguin eggs (they were a delicacy on the Titanic and South Africa’s parliamentary canteen served them every Wednesday morning for decades) saw almost half of African penguin eggs being eaten by humans.

The African penguin was first assessed as endangered in 2010, with subsequent assessments in 2016 and 2019 yielding the same result. “Endangered is defined as a population decline of at least 50% across three generation lengths,” explains marine ecologist Richard Sherley of the University of Exeter. “For the African penguin, one generation length is near-as-dammit 10 years.”

Sherley, who was one of the experts involved in the 2016, 2019 and 2024 assessments, says there’s been an almost catastrophic decline in the bird’s numbers in the past five years. “This time, the decline was 77%-78% across three generations,” he says. In other words, there are 78% fewer penguins now than there were in 1994.

While this precipitous drop falls just below the threshold for critically endangered (set at an 80% decline across three generations), IUCN criteria allow scientists to project into the future. Using that method, it seems highly likely that African penguins will meet the critically endangered threshold by 2028, if not before.

“It’s like a business forecast,” says Sherley, explaining that provided all the external factors remain the same, he’s confident in the model. “The critical point is that penguin numbers have declined almost every year for the past 23 years. If we don’t arrest that trend, we have no hope of saving them.”

The critical point is that penguin numbers have declined almost every year for the past 23 years. If we don’t arrest that trend, we have no hope of saving them

—  Marine ecologist Richard Sherley

The biggest threats facing African penguins are loss of habitat and of food supply, both of which are influenced by climate change. They are especially dependent on sardines and South Africa’s sardine and anchovy stocks are at all-time lows. Not being able to fly means penguins can’t travel as far in search of food as other seabirds can.

Sherley says the pelagic fishing industry has not caused the lack of prey, but it does “sit on top of it and makes it harder for penguins to survive”. Commercial fishing vessels use purse-seine nets (imagine a giant drawstring bag) to target entire shoals — often in the immediate vicinity of penguin colonies.

For almost two decades, conservationists have been working with the government and the fishing industry to ascertain whether stopping purse seine fishing around penguin colonies could be part of the solution. Experimental fishing closures were implemented around four penguin colonies in 2008 (later expanded to six colonies). In 2018 Sherley published a paper showing that the closures did have a meaningful benefit for the African penguin, but the fishing industry pushed back against this finding. In the case of Robben Island, for example, Sherley says “we now have models that suggest fishing closures could switch the population growth rate from negative to positive.”

As McInnes puts it: “I haven’t met a penguin scientist who doesn’t believe that carefully demarcated closures aren’t part of the solution.” 

Losing the penguins would be a disaster as they are an indicator species for the entire ecosystem

—  Alistair McInnes, BirdLife SA

In late 2022, after four failed rounds of government-led talks between the fishing industry and conservationists, the then minister of the environment Barbara Creecy appointed an independent international panel to put an end to the fishing closures stalemate. The panel delivered a report in July last year, saying targeted fishing closures around penguin colonies “would be likely to benefit penguin conservation”. When it came to delineating the closures, the report provided guidance on a “trade-off mechanism” that would balance the benefits to penguins against the disadvantages for the fishing industry.

While Creecy took some of the report’s recommendations on board, she did not follow the science on deciding how big each closure should be. Instead, she stuck with flawed “interim closures” she had implemented in 2022. In four out of six colonies, Creecy’s “interim closures” protect 50% or less of the penguins’ core foraging area (an area much smaller than the entire foraging range).

In March this year, BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) took the unprecedented step of filing court papers accusing Creecy of “abdicating her constitutional and statutory responsibilities to protect an endangered species”, says Kate Handley, executive director of the Biodiversity Law Centre, the law clinic representing the NGOs. The decision to petition the courts was not taken lightly, she says. “Time is quickly running out for the African penguin. We felt we couldn’t wait any longer.”

In August, Dion George of the DA, who replaced Creecy as environment minister in the government of national unity,  offered to settle the matter out of court, indicating that he was happy to follow the international panel’s recommendations regarding the precise demarcation of closures. George had not obtained buy-in from his co-respondents in the fishing industry, however, and despite recent high-level discussions between all stakeholders, the court case is still dragging on. As it stands, the matter will be heard in the Pretoria high court in March next year, although “the applicants remain open to satisfactory settlement proposals from the state and the fishing industry”, says Handley.

Ship-to-ship bunkering allows large ships to refuel at sea, thus avoiding the cost and inconvenience of coming into port. Before 2016, bunkering did not take place anywhere along the South African coastline. Since then, three licences have been granted in Algoa Bay, with some operations taking place within 10km of the penguin colony on St Croix Island.

In 2015, St Croix hosted 7,616 breeding pairs of African penguins, making it by far the biggest colony in the world at the time. By 2023 that number had declined to a paltry 712 breeding pairs.

Penguins are highly susceptible to shipping noise explains Dr Lorien Pichegru of Nelson Mandela University, who’s been studying St Croix’s penguins since 2008. “In a bid to get away from the noise, they swim further, to less productive feeding grounds. This means they probably can’t build up enough reserves to survive the moult, when they have to fast for three weeks.”

In October 2023, all three bunkering companies had their licences temporarily suspended over tax irregularities. As soon as the bunkering stopped, the penguins started coming back. This year 1,350 pairs used the island — almost twice as many as last year. “We can’t allow bunkering to resume,” says Pichegru.

—  Bunkering in Algoa Bay

No stone unturned

Without the efforts of organisations such as Sanccob and BirdLife it seems fairly likely the African penguin would already be extinct. As Sherley puts it: “Few seabirds have received as much funding and conservation attention as the African penguin.”

Since its founding in the aftermath of the Esso Essen oil spill in 1968, Sanccob has become a world leader in seabird rehabilitation. Staff at its rehab centres in Cape Town and Gqeberha hatch abandoned eggs, hand-rear abandoned chicks and rehabilitate injured and oiled birds — before releasing them back into the wild to breed and be a part of the solution.

At the same time, penguin scientists have embarked on pioneering research to better understand and conserve these birds. Some recent conservation highlights include:

• BirdLife South Africa has installed weighbridges that use radio frequency identification technology to weigh birds at four colonies before and after they go out foraging each day to determine if they’re getting enough food;
• Lorien Pichegru of Nelson Mandela University and Sherley have collaborated to assess the efficiency of different artificial nest designs. Their paper, released last month, found that artificial nests increase breeding performance by 16.5%, with the most effective design varying from colony to colony; and 
• BirdLife has partnered with CapeNature to establish a penguin colony in the De Hoop nature reserve, a site chosen for its relative accessibility to sardine stocks. Birds were attracted to the site by life-like penguin decoys and speakers playing penguin calls. The perimeter fence had to be strengthened to keep predatory honey badgers out, but four breeding pairs have already nested there successfully.

What next?

If sardine numbers don’t bounce back fairly soon, says Sherley, “we may already have passed the point of no return”. But, he adds: “I believe in trying. If we can’t save the penguin, what hope is there for less charismatic species?”

That’s why he’s supportive of South African conservationists’ efforts to enforce meaningful fishing closures and end to ship-to-ship bunkering in Algoa Bay, which disrupts the important penguin colony on St Croix island. “These two issues have become a focus because we’ve tried everything else,” he says. Short of stopping climate change, not much more can be done to save the African penguin.

Pichegru says: “African penguins can bounce back. Uniquely for seabirds, they can lay two clutches of two eggs per season. Just look at how the birds have come back to St Croix since the bunkering stopped. They don’t have to be extinct by 2035.”