August 19, 2021 — Editor’s Note: The debate over how to manage forage fisheries to account for the needs of their predators is prevalent in American fisheries as well as international ones. The study described in this article reached conclusions similar to a broader study recently published in the journal Conservation Biology, which found that in most cases, reducing the catch of forage species is unlikely to benefit their predators, and availability of forage is one of many complex environmental factors that plays a role in the size of predator populations.
Environment minister Barbara Creecy has a decision to make – does she allow fishing to continue around endangered penguin colonies or not?
Daily Maverick recently reported on the endangered African penguin and how conservation groups like the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) and BirdLife SA believe the biggest threat to colonies is prey availability, which is likely influenced by a combination of both environmental variation and resource competition by the pur-seine the fishing industry.
They want Creecy to ban fishing within a 20km radius of the six major penguin colonies – Dassen Island, Robben Island, Stony Point and Dyer Island in the Western Cape, and Bird and St Croix islands in the Eastern Cape.
Their recommendation is based on results of the island closure experiment that ran from 2008 to 2019. It was put in place to see if closing fishing around penguin colonies had a positive effect on penguin populations.
The South African Pelagic Fishing Industry Association (Sapfia) does not support a ban. Their position is based on UCT’s Prof Doug Butterworth’s recent assessment of the experiment – that closing fishing around colonies had no significant effect on halting the decline in penguin numbers.
Butterworth, who was contracted by the fisheries branch of the DFFE to do this research, and the Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group (MARAM) from UCT hold this view, but there are opposing views from other UCT groups including the FitzPatrick Institute and the Marine Research Institute and some individual academics like Professor Lynne Shannon who endorse the closure.