Some Good News For A Change!
African penguin chick by © Dan Callister/Penguins & Sharks
Numbers of African penguin breeding pairs have increased since fuel bunkering stopped in Algoa Bay.
On St Croix Island in Algoa Bay, South Africa, which is part of the Addo Elephant Marine Protected Area (MPA), there were 7,000 endangered African penguin breeding pairs in 2015. By 2023, the number had collapsed to just 700, according to researcher Professor Lorien Pichegru. But the good news is that numbers are rising again - thanks to a tax dispute.
St Croix, only 12 hectares in size and four kilometres from the Port of Coega (Ngqura) couldn’t be in a worse spot. The African penguins on St Croix suffer, says Pichegru, from the double whammy of commercial fishing in the surrounding areas and noise pollution from ships heading in and out of the port.
In a study published in 2022 called “Maritime traffic trends around the southern tip of Africa – Did marine noise pollution contribute to the local penguins’ collapse?” Pichegru led a team of eight fellow scientists as they researched the impact of noise in Algoa Bay.
They found that an increase in annual estimated vessel noise corresponded to a significant average decrease of penguin pairs and that the lowest recorded numbers of penguin breeding pairs corresponded to the period after ship-to-ship bunkering began in 2016.
Bunkering is a practice whereby ships are refuelled out at sea instead of coming into port. It’s a noisy process and increases the risk of oil spills. And in Algoa Bay all this takes place in or right next to the MPA.
“The intensification of underwater noise levels in the African penguin’s foraging habitat was linked to the initiation and expansion of ship-to-ship bunkering activities which intensified the maritime traffic in the area,” the scientists said in the 2022 paper. “Noise levels were significantly related to the collapse of what had been the world’s largest remaining colony of endangered African penguins.” Algoa Bay became one of the noisiest bays in the world.
But this year, the number of pairs of penguins, who mate for life, has almost doubled on St Croix. Pichegru, who has just returned from a stay on nearby Bird Island, says the number is up to 1,200 pairs.
This 71% year-on-year jump in numbers, she says, is because there has been no bunkering in the area in the last year. And this is because of a tax dispute. Earlier this year the Eastern Cape High Court heard the case, with the South African Revenue Service (SARS), which confiscated some of the refuelling vessels last year, claiming that illegal bunkering had cost the fiscus as much as R7-billion in lost revenue. The defendants said SARS’s directives about bunkering were unclear. The court found that SARS needed to clarify its regulations, a process that’s still ongoing. While this is ongoing bunkering has stopped, which is good for the penguin population.
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