Penguin Saga Continues!
Conservation
PENGUIN CONSERVATION: Rattling the food chain
by Michael Cherry, November 20 2014, 08:58
FOLLOWING a serious decline in the African penguin population, SA’s marine science community is fiercely debating the results of an experiment to determine the extent to which penguins and fishermen compete with each other.
This involves four islands which house penguin breeding colonies: Robben and Dassen on the west coast; and St Croix and Bird islands in Algoa Bay. In each case a 20km zone around a single island in each pair was closed to pelagic fishing for a three-year period while the other island remained open as a control, before reversing the situation (see Financial Mail November 13-19).