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Cape Town, South Africa
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Under the heat of a crisp summer morning on the shores of Betty’s Bay, South Africa, a colony of penguins stand with their white bellies toward the sun.
These are African penguins, and unlike their Antarctic-dwelling cousins, this smaller species thrives in the heat and lives along the more temperate coastlines of South Africa and Namibia.
These cute, charming birds attract tens of thousands of tourists to Southern Africa annually — but they are quickly disappearing from these shorelines. In 2024, the African penguin was listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Today, there are thought to be less than 10,000 breeding pairs left in the wild.
The Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) is one of the longest running seabird conservation groups in Southern Africa, focused on restoring populations through rescue missions, rehabilitation efforts and research. Founded in 1968, the organization is renowned for its work protecting African penguins.
“We are watching these birds every day coming in (to SANCCOB) with quite severe trauma, with emaciation problems; they are struggling a lot out in the wild,” said Jade Sookhoo, a rehabilitation manager at SANCCOB.
Over the last 30 years, African penguins have suffered an estimated 80% population collapse driven by pollution, habitat destruction and food scarcity — with a recent study naming starvation as a leading cause of death.
The study — a joint effort between South African’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment and the UK’s University of Exeter — found that more than 60,000 birds perished from malnourishment between 2004 and 2011 on Robben and Dassen islands — two of the most important breeding areas in South Africa.
African penguins rely on small schooling fish, such as sardines and anchovies, as their main food source. But climate change and intensive commercial fishing have sharply reduced fish stocks.
Along the Southern African coast, sardines are becoming increasingly scarce, forcing penguins to travel much farther offshore to find food — a shift that is taking a toll on both adult survival and the livelihoods of their chicks.
The study also revealed that for nearly two decades, sardine numbers have been chronically low, hovering around 25% of what they once were — signaling a long-term collapse in the western Southern Africa region.
And along Namibia’s coast, a former African penguin stronghold, rising ocean temperatures, changes in salinity and overfishing have caused the sardine population to effectively disappear.
“Fisheries are a huge business, and we don’t want fishing to stop completely; it is a vital part of our economy,” Robyn Fraser-Knowles of SANCCOB told CNN.
While no single factor is solely responsible for the decline in fish stocks, she warns, “if we don’t start fishing less, we’re going to end up with a collapsed ecosystem.”
At its world-class rehabilitation facilities, SANCCOB provides around-the-clock medical care and support for penguins and other seabirds suffering from injuries, oil contamination, disease and other ailments.
SANCCOB admitted 948 penguins into its care last year, and they were typically “thin, at best” on arrival, Fraser-Knowles said. One adult penguin recently admitted weighed just 1.9 kg (4.2 lb.), less than half the optimal weight of about 4 kg (8.8 lb.)
“The bodies that wash up and the ones that we treat, we can see this very, very strong trend,” Fraser-Knowles said. “You don’t find penguins in the wild that are the ideal body weight anymore.”
SANCCOB researcher Albert Snyman keeps a small pile of stones in his lab as a stark reminder of how severe the starvation crisis has become.
They were found in the stomachs of penguin chicks admitted to SANCCOB that later died, helping explain why they failed to thrive — the stones blocked their ability to absorb nutrients from the food they were being fed by staff.
“The parents were so desperate to feed the babies something that they were feeding them stones,” Fraser-Knowles said.
Abandonment is also an issue affecting the young. African penguin parents normally take turns caring for their chicks on land while the other forages in the sea. But with extreme weather, rising predation and longer, more distant foraging trips, they are increasingly abandoning their eggs and chicks, Fraser-Knowles says.
When one parent fails to return, either because it is killed or delayed by food scarcity, the remaining parent may leave the nest to search for food, effectively deserting the chicks.
Malnourishment impacts the penguins in many other ways, including their annual molt, according to Dr. David Roberts, a clinical veterinarian at SANCCOB.
African penguins undergo a yearly molt, during which they stay on land and fast for up to three weeks while they shed their worn feathers and grow new ones to keep them warm, buoyant and able to hunt in cold ocean waters.
When food is scarce, they cannot build up the fat reserves needed to survive this fast, so molting can be delayed or fail altogether.
“They come in (to SANCCOB) with really old, damaged feathers and we have to feed them and kickstart that molt cycle because they just can’t do it in the wild anymore,” Roberts told CNN.
But starvation is just one of many interconnected threats that these penguins face.
Roberts says most of his surgical work is the result of trauma injuries — which can be caused by anything from pollution to plastic entanglement.
But he says, more often than not, the injuries are the result of a predator’s bite — like from seals and sharks.
Injuries and deaths from predation increase when fish are scarce, as malnourished penguins are weaker and less able to evade predators.
Many African penguin colonies are located along major shipping routes or harbors where oil pollution remains a significant threat to the birds. Noise pollution from maritime vessels and ship-related injuries are further stressing populations.
With habitat loss and increased disturbances in and around their remaining habitats, “they don’t breed successfully, they don’t feed successfully and everything becomes more difficult for them,” said Fraser-Knowles.
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), a very contagious bird flu, and avian malaria also pose a significant threat to the penguins.
Despite the challenges African penguins face, there is some hope.
Just last year, African penguins scored a major victory. In March, conservationists and the commercial fishing industry reached an agreement to establish no-take zones protecting six key breeding colonies in South Africa for 10 years. These marine protected areas prohibit all extractive activities, from fishing to mining, providing penguins with a safer environment to feed and reproduce.
“According to the data, the no-take zone around Robben Island should stop the decline of that population just on that island by 2033, we hope, but of course, there are all these other factors at play,” Fraser-Knowles said.
Since its inception in 2006, SANCCOB’s chick bolstering project — which rescues abandoned hatchlings — has released more than 10,000 penguins back into their native habitat.
In 2021, SANCCOB established the world’s first man-made protected penguin colony in De Hoop Nature Reserve, where released penguins have now begun to breed.
Fraser-Knowles said success in the next five to 10 years will require stabilizing wild colonies, expanding no-take zones beyond current recommendations and significantly reducing sardine and anchovy fishing quotas.
She emphasized that consumer choices also matter: cutting back on livestock feed and pet food that contains fish, and opting to eat sustainably caught species listed in the WWF SASSI seafood guide, are steps people can make toward protecting African penguins, she said.
“They are an indicator species, and their decline is signaling that our ecosystem is in serious trouble,” she added. “If they don’t have food security, then the trickle-down effect starts and it will end with humans.”