South Africa will impose a decadelong ban on commercial fishing around six areas home to the endangered African penguin starting next year.
The measure, announced by the government on 4 August, comes after an expert panel concluded that a full ban on fishing was vital for the recovery of Africa’s only penguin species.
Scientists and environmental groups have praised the move. “This is an extremely important decision, made in an emerging economy context, where so often short-term socioeconomic imperatives override longer term environmental concerns,” says Guy Midgley, interim director of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University.
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are only found along the coastline of Namibia and South Africa and are considered at risk of extinction. The number of breeding pairs in South Africa plummeted by 73% from 1991 to 2021, dropping from 42,500 to 10,400. Scientists partly attribute the crash to a fall in stocks of anchovy and sardine—the birds’ main food source—because of environmental changes and commercial fishing around island breeding colonies.
To see whether limiting fishing could help penguin populations bounce back, between 2008 and 2021 officials experimented with closing the waters around some islands for staggered 3-year periods. This island closure experiment showed that eliminating fishing pressure in the vicinity of the colonies would have a modest impact, increasing the penguin population growth rate by about 1% per year, according to an expert panel set up to advise the government on next steps.
As an interim measure, the waters around six of the areas—Dassen Island, Robben Island, Dyer Island, St. Croix Island, Bird Island, and Stony Point—have been closed to commercial fishing for parts of each year since 2021–22. Based on the panel’s advice, Barbara Creecy, minister of forestry, fisheries, and the environment, has now decided to extend that ban. The decadelong closure will begin in January 2024, although exactly how large an area will be covered could change based on proposals from fishing and conservation groups. (Some conservationists hope the protected areas could ultimately be made larger.)
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The lengthy closure is a worthwhile conservation initiative, says Lauren Waller, a scientist with the Endangered Wildlife Trust. African penguins lay eggs and care for chicks year-round, she says, so closing waters off these colonies to fishing could reduce the competition the penguins face for food. The long closure will also enable scientists to gather more detailed data on how fishing bans affect both adult and juvenile penguin survival, she says. The previous 3-year-long experiments were too short to look at impacts on individual penguins’ survival. A review of the ban, which is due to take place in 6 years’ time, will allow scientists to examine these kinds of effects.
The ban could also benefit two other endangered seabirds, the Cape gannet and Cape cormorant, that also rely on sardine and anchovy as their primary food source, Waller says. But fishing bans are only one part of the solution, because the birds also face threats from pollution and other human activities, says conservation biologist Alistair McInnes of BirdLife South Africa.
In the past, fishing groups have raised concerns that closing the areas could lead to reduced catch and job losses. Mike Copeland, chair of the South African Pelagic Fishing Industry Association, says the association is quantifying the potential effects of the ban. The decision represents a “difficult trade-off” between benefits to the penguin population and potential job losses because of poorer fishing, he says.
Some predict that any impact on the fishing industry will be minimal. “The birds are closely tied to the islands to be able to feed their chicks—the fishing industry [is] not,” said Simon Elwen, director of Sea Search Research and Conservation. “[Fishing boats] can range all over, so I really don’t see that it will have any significant impact on the fishers.”
