Newsletter / Blog
2011-06-20 African Penguin - how much fish do they eat per year?
The ADU - Animal Demography Unit - presented results of a research project sponsored by the Responsible Fisheries Alliance - RFA,
a partnership between WWF South Africa, and four major fishing industry
players, namely I&J, Oceana, Sea Harvest and Viking: "This is the
first alliance of its kind in the history of South African marine
conservation. The Alliance is a bid to achieve the common goal of
ensuring the implementation of an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries - EAF
management in South Africa's fisheries.
The objective of our research was to provide an estimate of the
amount of fish removed from the oceans each year by African Penguins - Spheniscus demersus. They
used doubly labelled water to estimate the energy consumption, and we
used GPS data loggers to tell us how much time the penguins were
spending on land and how much time at sea. After lots of difficult
fieldwork, laboratory analyses, and calculations, we have an answer.
Each adult penguin consumes an estimated 79 kg of anchovy during the
breeding season. In addition, it takes 23 kg of anchovy to produce a
3 kg chick. During the remainder of the year we estimate that each adult
penguin consumes another 184 kg of anchovies. So in a year, for a pair
of adults to breed successfully and produce two chicks, and if they eat
only anchovy, our estimate of the total fish requirement is 570 kg. This
quantification of the energy needs of penguins provides a valuable
piece of new information in the conservation database.
Penguins are ambassadors for the ocean. If we can take care of the
penguins we will also help lots of less charismatic components of the
ocean to survive.
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