Recently I had the privilege of listening to seabird scientist Professor Lorien Pichegru talk at the monthly Know-Your-Bay event at Bayworld on the extinction threat to the African penguin.
Her update comes after being personally targeted in the popular press in response to the suggested closing off sufficient areas around six critical penguin colonies to pelagic fishing.
The threat of extinction is real. From an estimated million-plus breeding pairs in the early 1900s, the number of African penguin breeding pairs is now 10,000.
In Algoa Bay specifically, scientists have seen the penguin numbers on St Croix Island alone decline from 10,000 pairs in 2004 to 1,500 pairs in 2021.
In short, if the current trend persists, seabird scientists predict the species will be “functionally extinct” within 10 to 20 years.
By the time today’s child turns 21, the African penguin will have joined the dodo in our museum display cabinets.
What can we do?
Seabird scientists like Prof Pichegru, who spend weeks at a time living among the penguins on the islands, and the department of forestry, fisheries and environment, know the answer.
The department’s most recent Biodiversity Management Plan (BMP) is clear: enhance food resources; improve their habitat and breeding facilities; restrict human interaction; minimise predator impacts; mitigate against catastrophes like oil spills, bird influenza and climate change; rescue and rehabilitate at-threat birds, and spread the word about the bird far and wide.
Many are doing exactly that. Organisations like Sanccob do sterling work in recovery and rehabilitation of African penguins. Others like Birdlife SA, WWF, and EWT have been key to getting the penguin listed as endangered and bringing global resources to bear.
Like our Sanccob facility at Cape Recife, Boulders Beach in Simon’s Town, managed by SANParks, and the Two Oceans Aquarium have made great strides in getting the public up close and personal with penguins.
Basically, every known contributing cause of the African penguin’s rapid decline is being extensively addressed, with one exception — our competition for their food.
African penguins dine on pelagic fish — the collective term for fish like anchovy and sardines — but our penguins are finding less of them and must go far further to catch them.
The proposal from those who know and work to save the penguins is simple — designate adequate no-pelagic-fishing zones around the six colonies that are home to 90% of the population.
You wouldn’t think that with South African fishing waters that cover about 1.1-million km² (our land mass equals 1.2-million km²), six zones that cover a few hundred km² would create such a fuss.
To be clear, some of the proposed area is already closed off. But the call has been branded as “emotional”, “biased”, “false” and “misleading”.
And at the heart of what has been cast as a “two-sides” debate, is the less obvious question: why should we do something? Why save the African penguin?
And the answer by those aggrieved by the proposal is a popular false binary: food on the table vs saving a cute tuxedo-clad sea bird. Prioritise jobs and food for humans, there are plenty more fish in the sea.
Except of course, the reality is that there aren’t plenty more fish — our fish stocks are severely overexploited, just ask the fisher folk themselves.
For instance, every year the department of forestry, fisheries and environment sets the total allowable catch (TAC) for fish stocks.
In 2013, the small pelagic TAC limit for anchovy was 450,000 tons; in 2022, that limit is set to 341,000 tons. For sardines it was 90,000 and 30,000 respectively.
Two things to note: we humans take a ginormous amount, and the total catch limit is dropping fast.
Importantly, what we net doesn’t go to anyone’s table. Our pelagic fish mainly get ground into fish meal and exported, ironically to feed fish overseas.
Nor does the canned fish we associate with Chef Mboweni come from South African waters — they’re mainly frozen imports.
And “small pelagic” isn’t to be confused with “small-scale” fishers. The latter use only handlines, not nets, so don’t catch anchovy or sardines.
In fact, most of our pelagic catch goes to one company, via an intricate system of commercial fishers who sell off their TAC allocation rights.
And therein lies the problem: what’s advertised on the outside of the can isn’t quite what’s on the inside.
The focus is on select facts, which are then polished for effect. For instance, the strident assertion is made that maths must be king, specifically, “quantitative marine resource ecosystem modelling” that conveniently claims more data is needed before we can be sure.
This ignores the multitude of scientific papers by seabird specialists that clearly show that our penguins are mainly dying from starvation.
But at the heart of this lies a fundamental flaw in how we approach the ocean, in how we see the sea.
SA’s environmental laws are centred on the principle of “sustainable development”, essentially a three-legged pot that is meant to balance nature with economic and social needs.
That pot is unbalanced when it rests only on a “blue-economy” mindset, driven by short-term profits for big corporates.
As the Xolobeni community and others have been trying to teach us, the African stewardship model is based on the ancient wisdom of “leave some for the honey badger”.
Extracting everything we can is good for big league balance sheets, but not good for our grandchildren. We are part of nature, not separate from it.
We must take from nature to survive, that will not change, but if we leave nothing for the penguins, it’s only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves. Because by leaving some we allow the fish stocks to replenish — unlike us, penguins don’t take everything.
And therein the lesson of the African penguin: it’s a sentinel species, it’s the dashboard indicator flashing red that our ecosystem is in dire straits.
And ironically, if we wish to continue putting food on the table, saving the African penguin is more about saving us, saving long-term fishing jobs, than it is about taking cute Instagram pictures of birds in tuxedos.
We must act now. Should we continue kicking the can down the road, then we will be the jackass, not the African penguin.
HeraldLIVE