African Penguin conservation

Current state of affairs

A global standard for seriously unhealthy populations is when decreases hit 10% of their former (pre-exploitation/decrease levels). So what's with the African Penguin, and the hype about a Species Champion? Is BirdLife South Africa being alarmist? We don't believe so, and this is why.

The African Penguin is currently being considered by BirdLife International for uplisting from Vulnerable to Endangered. It is on a strong, downward population trajectory. The rate of decrease is positively alarming. Less than 100 years ago the colony at Dassen Island alone, already subject to huge harvesting pressures and other disturbance, stood at ~1 million pairs. In 2008, around 6000 pairs bred there. That amounts to a loss of 20,000 pairs per year! The situation is mirrored at all other colonies: globally there are fewer than 30,000 pairs – essentially the loose change from the estimates of a century ago. The current global population is just 3% of the estimate from the Dassen Island colony in the 1920s! The Dassen Island colony is at 0.5% of its former levels. The details are pretty alarming. All the combined annual counts since 2005 have been downward, with some 5,000–10,000 pairs disappearing from the breeding bird census figures each year. The situation has been described, with some justice, as 'freefall'. In addition to sharp decreases at all African Penguin colonies, adult survival at Dassen and Robben islands has decreased recently.

What's driving this?

A population decreases when mortality exceeds recruitment. Attempts to increase recruitment of African Penguins have included maintenance and improvement of nesting habitat, and captive rearing and release of orphaned wild chicks. Attempts to decrease mortality include eradicating invasive predators, reducing predation by natural predators (e.g. seals) around colonies, rehabilitation and release of oiled and injured penguins, and disease control. None of these efforts have halted the decreases. By far the biggest concern is, quite simply, a lack of food. Reduced food availability due to over-fishing of their primary food, anchovy and sardine, is the biggest cause. However, since 2005 there has been an eastward shift of these stocks, believed to be due to climate change and over-fishing on the West Coast. This shift has brought about a mismatch in the distributions of the breeding localities and prey of African Penguins. Most food is now located east of the breeding localities in the Western Cape and west of breeding localities in the Eastern Cape.

What are we doing about this?

Through the resources that our Species Champion has provided, we are working on a 3-year plan to ensure that penguin (and other predator) foraging requirements are included in the stock models used by Marine and Coastal Management. We are also supporting an existing programme looking at how marine reserves around penguin islands, if they are protected from fishing, might improve important parameters for the species, such as adult survival, reproductive success, etc.