Will competition with fishermen nudge Africa’s only penguin towards extinction?

A century ago, as many as two million African penguins flourished on the rocky shores along the Namibian coast and South Africa’s western seaboard, meaning they forage in the Benguela current where the chilly Atlantic Ocean encounters the warm Indian Ocean, causing an explosion of nutrient-rich water and the proliferation of small oily fish like sardines and anchovies—the birds’ favourite prey.

Today, the situation is dramatically different. The currents are still flowing and the nutrients are still abundant, but the fish schools have crashed, as have African penguins, which today number just 10,000. Scientists project that these critically endangered penguins will be extinct in the wild in just over a decade without some sort of intervention.

Closures: ‘Not sufficient’ but may be locked in from 2024

To protect the bird’s food supply and slow its population collapse, South Africa is throwing a protective no-fishing cordon around its main breeding colonies in a bid to help penguins find enough prey. The ban, first instituted in September 2022, was a desperate effort to halt the penguins’ decline

But the devil is in the details, and conservationists say time is running out to get the policy up to scratch before an early 2024 deadline.

South African seabird conservationists have had to launch a number of rescue operations in recent years, collecting thousands of starving African penguin, Cape gannet and Cape cormorant chicks from key breeding colonies after they were abandoned by hungry parents. These rescues, conservationists say, show the extent to which the birds’ main food source, anchovies and sardines is disappearing from their foraging ranges. With less of their favourite food the penguins changed their diet to eat a large percentage of Cape horse mackerel, which has a lower energy content than anchovy.

Previous research does show that the penguin populations struggle when sardine stocks are low, but that work didn’t prove that low sardine numbers actually cause the penguin’s decline. (That said, sardine stocks are at their lowest levels in decades.) And there’s no clear link between the birds’ survival and the size of the anchovy stock—another detail that appears to undermine concerns over competition with fisheries.

There’s a good reason this ban is so contentious. At a fundamental level, scientists aren’t sure it will make a big enough difference to save the African penguin.

Dwindling food is one of the main threats — but hardly the only one — driving a crash in African penguin numbers in the past three decades. It could be that adult penguins have low survival rates, that chicks are dying young, that parents aren’t breeding successfully, or a combination of these factors.

Death by a dozen cuts

Several other possible explanations also have nothing to do with the birds competing with South Africa’s fishers. In some colonies, for instance, predators such as kelp gulls and feral cats eat penguin eggs and kill chicks.  According to observations, Cape fur seals killed about seven percent of the adult penguins on Dyer Island, South Africa.

But time is rapidly running out for African penguins. Even though the closure gains are small, only one percent of population growth, and neither fishermen nor conservationists are happy about the intervention, there’s a chance the ban could help protect the species from imminent extinction. The community has until January 15, 2024, to offer new proposals to protect both penguin's and fishers’ livelihoods. Otherwise, the limitations will continue until 2033.

For species living on the edge of extinction, policymakers will increasingly have to act—even if their evidence is imperfect.