In A Bit More Than 100 Years, 99% Of Southern African Penguins Are Gone - Overfishing, Climate Collapse

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Welcome to the nonprofit Southern African Foundation for the Conservation Of Coastal Birds’ hatchery and nursery, where hundreds of these birds are hand-reared after being injured or abandoned in the wild. While this conservation center is a flourishing refuge for African penguins, the species as a whole is in dire straits. Over the past century, African penguin populations have plummeted, dropping from around one million breeding pairs in the early 1900s to less than 10,000 in 2023 as environmental conditions have worsened due to increased fishing pressure and climate change, which have both decreased fish populations on which penguins rely.

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It’s difficult to pin a single threat to the demise of African penguins; oil spills, avian flu and extreme weather events have wreaked havoc on colonies across South Africa. These chronic issues combine with freak incidents: In 2021, a swarm of bees killed more than 60 African penguins on the popular Boulders Beach in Cape Town and, a year later, two huskies killed 19 penguins in the same area. However, scientists say that one of the main causes of the seabirds’ decline is the intense fishing pressure on sardines and anchovies, the penguin’s main diet.

Fighting unemployment, low-income people fish around coastal beaches to support themselves, said Shanet Rutgers, an animal health technician at the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa, and there is a large commercial industry for purse-seine fishing, in which a wall of netting is cast around a school of fish. “When they pull out too much fish in the ocean, they leave the colonies with almost little to nothing to feed on,” she said.

Over millions of years, African penguins have developed the ability to sense cues in the water that might indicate the availability of fish, such as low surface temperatures and high levels of chlorophyll. However, anchovies and sardines go through natural cycles of boom and bust, research shows, which can decrease fish availability for these seabirds. Compounding the problem, fishing and climate change have hammered fish populations in the areas off the coasts of Namibia and western South Africa that the penguins are programmed to visit to find food, putting them into what scientists are calling an “ecological trap,” according to a 2017 study. “It’s like if you follow the supermarket sign and you drive there and the supermarket is closed down,” said Katta Ludynia, the lead researcher at the Foundation.



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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25122023/african-penguins-almost-wiped-out-by-overfishing-climate-change/