Under the heat of a cool summer morning on the shores of Betty’s Bay, South Africa, a colony of penguins stands with their white bellies facing 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 coasts of South Africa and Namibia.
These cute, charismatic birds attract tens of thousands of tourists to southern Africa every year — but they are quickly disappearing from these shores. In 2024, the African penguin was classified as by IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Today, there are believed to be fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs in the wild.
SANCCOB (Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds) is one of the oldest seabird conservation groups in the region, focused on restoring populations through rescue missions, and research. Founded in 1968, the organization is recognized for its work protecting African penguins.
“We are seeing these birds every day arriving (at SANCCOB) with quite serious trauma, with weight loss problems; they are facing a lot of difficulty in the wild,” said Jade Sookhoo, rehabilitation manager at SANCCOB.
Over the past 30 years, African penguins have suffered an estimated 80% population collapse, driven by pollution, habitat destruction and food shortages — with a recent study pointing to hunger as one of the main causes of death.
The study — a joint effort between South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment and the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom — found that more than 60,000 birds died from malnutrition between 2004 and 2011 on Robben and Dassen Islands — two of South Africa’s most important breeding areas.
Declining food stocks
African penguins depend on small fish that swim in schools, such as sardines and anchovies, as their main source of food. But climate change and intensive commercial fishing have drastically reduced fish stocks.
Along the coast of southern Africa, sardines are becoming increasingly scarce, forcing penguins to travel much further out to sea in search of food — a change that is taking a toll on both the survival of adults and the livelihood of their chicks.
The study also revealed that for nearly two decades, sardine numbers have remained chronically low, at around 25% of what they once were — signaling a long-term collapse in the western region of southern Africa.
And along the coast of Namibia, once a stronghold of African penguins, rising ocean temperatures, changes in salinity and overfishing have caused the sardine population to virtually disappear.
“Fishing is big business, and we don’t want it to stop completely; it’s a vital part of our economy,” SANCCOB’s Robyn Fraser-Knowles told CNN.
Although no single factor is solely responsible for the decline in fish stocks, she warns: “if we don’t start fishing less, we will end up with a collapsed ecosystem.”
Hunger: an alarming reality
At its world-class rehabilitation facilities, SANCCOB provides 24-hour medical care and support to penguins and other seabirds suffering from injuries, oil contamination, disease and other problems.
SANCCOB took 948 penguins into its care last year, and they often arrived “skinny at best,” Fraser-Knowles said. A recently admitted adult penguin weighed just 1.9 kg, less than half the ideal weight, which is about 4 kg.
“Nos and in the ones we treated, we were able to see this very, very strong trend,” said Fraser-Knowles. “You don’t find penguins in the wild anymore with the ideal body weight.”
SANCCOB researcher Albert Snyman keeps a small pile of rocks in his lab as a blunt reminder of how serious the famine crisis has become.
They were found in the stomachs of penguin chicks admitted to SANCCOB who later died, helping to explain why they were unable to develop — the stones blocked their ability to absorb nutrients from the food they received from the team.
“The parents were so desperate to feed the chicks that they ended up giving them rocks,” said Fraser-Knowles.
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Abandonment is also a problem that affects young people. African penguin parents typically take turns caring for their chicks on land while the other forages for food at sea. But with extreme weather events, increased predation and longer, more distant foraging trips, they are increasingly abandoning their eggs and young, according to Fraser-Knowles.
When one parent does not return—either because it is killed or delayed by food shortages—the remaining parent may leave the nest to forage for food, effectively abandoning the chicks.
Malnutrition also affects penguins in many other ways, including annual molt, according to Dr David Roberts, clinical veterinarian at SANCCOB.
African penguins undergo an annual molt, during which they remain on land and fast for up to three weeks while they shed their worn-out feathers for new ones, essential to keeping them warm, buoyant and able to hunt in cold ocean waters.
When food is scarce, they are unable to accumulate the fat reserves necessary to survive this fast, so molting may be delayed or not occur at all.
“They arrive (at SANCCOB) with very old and damaged feathers, and we need to feed them and restart that molting cycle, because they just can’t do that in the wild anymore,” Roberts told CNN.
But starvation is just one of many interconnected threats these penguins face.
Threats that worsen the crisis
Roberts says most of his surgical work results from traumatic injuries — which can be caused by everything from pollution to entanglement in plastic.
But, according to him, most of the time, the injuries are the result of a bite from a predator — such as seals and sharks.
Injuries and deaths from predation increase when fish are scarce, as malnourished penguins become weaker and less able to escape predators.
Many African penguin colonies are located along major shipping lanes or ports, where oil pollution remains a significant threat. Noise pollution from vessels and ship-related injuries are also putting further pressure on 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,” Fraser-Knowles said.
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), a highly contagious bird flu, and avian malaria also pose a significant threat to penguins.
Some victories for the penguins
Despite the challenges facing African penguins, there is some hope.
Last year, the African penguins won a big victory. In March, conservationists and the commercial fishing industry reached an agreement to establish no-fishing zones protecting six important breeding colonies in South Africa for 10 years. These marine protected areas prohibit all extractive activities, from fishing to mining, offering penguins a safer environment to feed and breed.
“According to the data, the exclusion zone around Robben Island should halt the decline of that particular population by 2033, we hope, but of course there are all these other factors at play,” Fraser-Knowles said.
Since its creation in 2006, SANCCOB’s chick booster project — which rescues abandoned chicks — has returned more than 10,000 penguins to their natural habitat.
In 2021, SANCCOB established the world’s first man-made, protected penguin colony in the De Hoop Nature Reserve, where the reintroduced penguins have already begun breeding.
Fraser-Knowles said success over the next five to 10 years will require stabilizing wild colonies, expanding exclusion zones beyond current recommendations, and significantly reducing fishing quotas for sardines and anchovies.
She highlighted that consumer choices also make a difference: reducing the use of farmed animal feed and pet food that contains fish, and choosing to consume sustainably caught species listed in the WWF SASSI seafood guide, are measures that people can take to protect African penguins.
“They are an indicator species, and their decline is signaling that our ecosystem is in serious trouble,” he added. “If they are not food secure, the cascade effect begins — and will end in humans.”
