Green Life
May 27, 2011 | By Tiara WaltersAction is needed if our local species is not to go the way of the dodo
UNDER THREAT: A pair of African penguins at Boulders Beach in Cape Town
"African penguins have declined by about 80% - from 141000 pairs in the 1950s to less than 25 000 pairs in 2010," according to Mark Anderson, CEO of conservation NGO Birdlife South Africa, who explained that oil spills, overfishing and predation by seals and gulls are among factors responsible for the dramatic crash in the species's population.
"In the past, African penguins were also affected by guano scraping as well as egg collection," he told Green Life.
South Africa's best-known African penguin colony, at Boulders Beach in the naval dorp of Simon's Town, was only occupied by the birds in 1983 with the reduction of commercial trawlers in the surrounding False Bay area. This beach - with its sheltered bay and proximity to recovering fish stocks - must've seemed like the Hamptons of the avian world to the newly arrived penguins.
These days, however, the African penguin's Boulders Beach idyll is also under threat. Scientists suspect that changing ocean temperatures as a result of climate change have been shifting the availability of sardines and anchovies - the African penguin's favourite food - farther afield.
"African penguins are being forced to swim much longer distances, to places like Cape Agulhas, to forage," says Birdlife South Africa's penguin project officer, Christina Moseley. "But this year the fish are moving back to the West Coast, so it's a complicated study that needs further interrogation."
Now a group of animal handlers from zoological and conservation organisations throughout the country are so worried about the African penguin's prospects that they have joined forces to stop this flightless bird from going the way of the dodo.
Comprising, among others, staff from uShaka Sea World, the Two Oceans Aquarium and the SA Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, the campaigners left Gansbaai on Monday as part of an emergency coastal awareness trek - organised in under a month - that aims to put a spotlight on the problems that besiege the African penguin. The six-day pilgrimage covered 122km of Western Cape shoreline and marched through the coastal towns of Hermanus, Kleinmond, Betty's Bay, Pringle Bay, Gordon's Bay and Muizenberg before arriving in Simon's Town yesterday, just as National Bird Week drew to a close.
"The support we have rustled up has been overwhelming - but most South Africans have no clue about this species and how crucial it is. We think of the African penguin as an 'indicator' species - in other words, the moment we notice that it is in decline, this is also an indication that the environment is degrading, so we're asking that everyone makes a 'penguin promise' - eat less meat; drive less often; plant a veggie garden," said one of the trek's masterminds, Two Oceans bird trainer Hayley McLellan.
"The African penguin's minimum viable population is estimated to be 50000 pairs, but the current population is now less than half this critical threshold."
If we don't act, she said, the African penguin "could be extinct within 15 years".
- www.penguinpromises.com
- The largest penguin to walk the face of the Earth was Nordenskjoeld's giant penguin, which lived between Australia and Antarctica about45-million years ago. This gargantuan penguin stood 1.8m tall and weighed up to 90kg, which is about as tall and heavy as rugby Springbok Bryan Habana (1.8m; 94kg).
- All modern penguins, whose height varies between 40cm and 1m, have evolved from Waimanu manneringi, a common ancestor that lived about 62-million years ago - some three million years before the dinosaurs met their catastrophic end.
- Part fish, part bird, part seal, penguins are an evolutionary marvel that fly through the oceans as though they were flapping through an alternative sky. While all modern penguins are flightless, their wings indicate that they diverged many millions of years ago from an ancestor that was capable of flight. Today penguin wings are vestigial, which means that they have become redundant and morphed into flippers.
- All penguins are native to the Southern Hemisphere, although there is a colony of around 1500 Galapagos penguins (pictured here) that live just north of the equator on the Galapagos Islands.
- If ever the gay community were looking for a totem animal, the penguin could be it. Some penguins form lasting homosexual couples and in 2005 American writers Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson wrote a children's book about it. Based on the true story of Roy and Silo, two Central Park Zoo chinstrap penguins that raised their own chick, And Tango Makes Three courted controversy when the book made its way into the American heartland.
- The African penguin only breeds on 25 islands and four mainland sites in SA and Namibia. It can live up to 25 years in captivity and up to 15 in the wild.
- Penguins can survive at sea because they have a special gland in their nasal passages that filters salt and helps them drink sea water like the average South African male can knock back beer.
- The World Conservation Union upgraded the African penguin's conservation status from vulnerable to endangered in June last year. Up to 50% of all eggs produced by the African penguin were collected as a delicacy until 1967 and Roberts Birds of Southern Africa records that 2.3-million eggs were collected between 1897 and 1905 alone. - Sources: Birdlife South Africa, various
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