British tourists flock to see Cape Town’s endangered penguins… but they had better get there soon
Cape Town’s famed penguins which attract huge numbers of tourists could be extinct in little over a decade, conservationists have warned.
Numbers of African penguins are collapsing as fishing fleets compete for their sardine and anchovy diet and fish stocks move elsewhere due to climate change.
The species was last week officially upgraded to critically endangered status, one step away from a declaration that it had disappeared in the wild.
The Boulders Beach colony just outside Cape Town is one of the city’s tourist jewels and attracted close to a million visitors each year before Covid-19.
African penguins, Spheniscus demersus, are one of the smallest varieties and have also been known as “jackass” penguins, for their donkey-like bray.
Visitor numbers are steeply rising again, but the attraction is in danger of vanishing without action to safeguard the seabirds, campaigners say.
The penguins have lost more than 97 per cent of their numbers over the past century, and overall there are now thought to be fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs.
If the trend continues, Boulders Beach and the six other major colonies along the coast of South Africa which are home to most of the birds will soon become unsustainable.
Nicky Stander, head of conservation at the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, said: “In just over a decade, they could no longer exist, which not only has an impact on our marine ecosystem, but also on South Africa’s economy and ecotourism.
Numbers are currently falling by nearly 8 per cent per year.
She said: “If that rate continues, then the penguins will be extinct in the wild.
“Penguins will still be available to see in zoos and sanctuaries and under human care, but they will not be at the colonies because the colonies would have collapsed.”
‘Extremely rapid population decline’
The International Union for Conservation of Nature last week reported that African penguins were “undergoing an extremely rapid population decline”.
The Swiss-based international conservation body said the reasons were probably “competition with commercial fisheries and climate-mediated shifts in prey populations”.
The decline has accelerated and numbers are expected to fall another 80 per cent over the next three penguin generations.
The union concluded: “This trend currently shows no sign of reversing, and immediate conservation action is required.”
Conservation organisations are now taking legal action against South Africa’s government to try to force it to impose more robust fishing restrictions to protect the birds’ prey.
While the government has imposed some “no-take” zones for fishermen, they are insufficient to protect the penguins’ food supply, conservationists say.
Alistair McInnes, seabird conservation programme manager, at BirdLife South Africa, said: “The availability of sardine and anchovy is the key driver of the African penguin population.”
Critical intervention
Implementing more effective no-take zones around the last remaining large colonies “is a critical intervention to help conserve this species”, he said.
“If we don’t act timeously we could lose Africa’s only penguin species within our lifetime.”
Conservationists accuse the government of making too many concessions to the fishing industry and are calling for a 20-mile protected zone around the surviving penguin colonies.
The campaign to save the penguin is also collecting names in a petition to try to persuade Pretoria of the strength of feeling about the risk to the birds.
Records from the beginning of the 20th century show somewhere between 1.5 million to 3 million African penguins, making them the most common coastal seabird in Southern Africa at the time.
Egg collecting and the harvesting of droppings for fertiliser hit the population hard, but from the middle of the 20th century onwards, it has been fishing which has been the largest threat.
While the situation is grim, previous experience shows that given plentiful food, penguins can breed as many as three times a year.
When sardine numbers have spiked in the past, a leap in penguin numbers has followed quickly.
Ms Stander said: “We believe it’s not too late. We know from historical data that when food availability is good, African penguins can recover. They can bounce back and they will breed successfully and that’s what we need them to do.”