Seabird ranger Eduard Drost was busy with a routine inspection in an African penguin colony off the South African coast in 2021 when he noticed a troubling number of sickly birds.
“Some were emaciated, especially the chicks,” he recalls. “Their chest and hip bones were sticking out. Their bellies were flat, not rounded.”
It looked as though they weren’t feeding well, and his colleagues at the nonprofit Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), which helps monitor the colony, on Bird Island, agreed. As soon as a weather window opened, South African National Parks, a government agency, sent in a helicopter to airlift 95 starving chicks for hand rearing at a rehabilitation center on the mainland, 60 kilometers (37 miles) away in the port city of Gqeberha.
This rescue is a red flag for marine conservationists. The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) is expected to go extinct in the wild in just over a decade, given its current population decline. The main reason is a lack of food — sardines, mostly — caused by disruptions to ocean conditions from global heating and competition from the commercial fishing industry.
Another colony in the same bay, on St. Croix Island, just 43 km (27 mi) away, has seen one of the most devastating population crashes in recent years. Annual head counts show that St. Croix’s penguin numbers dropped by 85% in five years, between 2016 and 2021.
Related Posts
Scientists have identified a possible additional cause, one that is an entirely new threat and that further inhibits the penguins from finding food: noise pollution from marine vessels in a bay that has become one of the noisiest shipping hubs on the planet.
These two colonies, in the busy port area of Algoa Bay, are the eastern-most breeding sites for the species. If the collapse occurring here were to affect the entire African penguin population, conservationists say it would bring about the D-Day for functional extinction much sooner than 2035.
Home of the ‘jackass’
The African penguin is the only penguin species indigenous to the continent. Historically it occupied a relatively short coastal stretch from Namibia down to the south-western coastline of South Africa, ending here at Algoa Bay.
Once called the “jackass” penguin because its honking call sounds like a donkey’s braying, the bird is now endangered. South Africa’s breeding colonies have crashed by 73% in the past three decades, dropping from about 42,500 breeding pairs in 1991 to just 10,400 in 2021.
Threats compounding the disruptions to the birds’ food supply are oil spills, lost habitat and breeding sites, and diseases like avian flu.
Drowned out by noise?
Algoa Bay has two regionally significant industrial harbors that make it a busy route for marine traffic. Since 2016, a new shipping practice has started here that makes it an even more attractive pit stop for passing vessels. The bay now offers ship-to-ship refueling for vessels anchored offshore, known as ship-to-ship bunkering, which saves in-port docking time.
Since the start of this practice, marine traffic in the bay has doubled, according to penguin researchers and conservationists who monitor the population there. Notably, while both Bird Island and St. Croix Island have to cope with possible disturbances from passing traffic, the bunkering ships anchor close to St. Croix, exposing the birds there to far greater levels of shipping activity and noise.
