How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 105: African Penguin Population Tied To Prey
This week's Research Thursday, I chat about how a study found that the African Penguin population success was highly tied to the population of the sardine and anchovy. This has great implications for managing the penguin species, which is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN Red List.
Support the Podcast:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/patreon
Shop for the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/shop
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session105
Welcome to the Speaker for Blue Podcast, session 105. Welcome back, everybody. Today is research Thursday, so that means I'm taking a research paper and I'm talking about it. Because species Tuesday was all about the African penguin, it kind of inspired me to look up some research papers about the African penguin, so we're going to look at population increases and decreases and why that happens in South Africa with the African penguin. Stay tuned for this episode of the Speaker for Blue Podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, can't get the song Bad Blood out of his head, Andrew Lewin. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean pernour. And today is research Thursdays, which means I take a research paper that interests me and it has to do with ocean conservation and I read it out to you or I kind of interpret it for you after I read it. And we talk about it and you get to know what's going on in ocean science around the world. So because Species Tuesday was all about the African penguin and yesterday's podcast was talking to Esther Jacobs Overbeek, who lives in South Africa and does research on Great White Sharks. She also helps at a rescue center for African penguins. She helps them out every once in a while. So I just got inspired, I said, you know what, I don't know anything about penguins. A lot of us don't know anything about penguins and did you really know that there was penguins in South Africa? Who knew? Right? So we're going to talk about them. We're going to talk really about their population and how it goes up and down with fish populations, which is interesting. So we're going to talk all about that. But before we do, I just want to thank our supporters from Patreon, Chris and Claire Jefford, Dr. Judith Weiss, Ron and Judy, thank you very much for your support. If you want to support us and support ocean conservation and getting the ocean conservation message out to other people in podcast land, you can do so at speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. And you can just go there. You can put in a level of support. It can range from a dollar and up. There are different levels, different incentives to get you to, you know, contribute at a higher rate, but it's up to you. Remember, it is a monthly contribution. So don't go spending a lot of money thinking, hey, this is great, but then it does come out monthly. So let's work together on that. I don't want anything. I don't want you to lose money and not realize it and get mad at me. But what I'd love for you to do is support our efforts to get the ocean conservation message out there. As we build our Patreon sort of community, our speakupforblue.com community through this campaign, this crowdfunding campaign, we will add some extra little things in Patreon that other people can't see, just to kind of thank you and give you some extra behind the scenes, look at what I do and all that kind of stuff. And it's just fun stuff. And we're actually going to be building on it. So we have specific goals that we can get if we get a certain amount of month. That means we can afford to put out more video, we can actually put out videos, a little more dedicated videos with a little bit of editing and so forth. And then we can actually put out a digital magazine, which is what I'm looking forward to so that we can put out something that is science based, conservation based, and not just pretty pictures. So that's what we're planning on doing here, going forward, so your support will go towards that. And it really just gets us to reaching, it gets us getting the ocean conservation message to reach different audiences on various platforms. That's the whole point of what we're trying to do here. So thank you very much for those that are supportive, that are supporting right now, and those who are will, just go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you can help support the ocean conservation message right now in a podcast land, what I like to call a podcast land. Anyway, let's talk about penguins. Like I said before, I wanted to do a penguin research paper, a look up a penguin research paper just because this week has basically been almost an African week. We talked about African penguins on Tuesday, a species Tuesday, and then yesterday in the interview with Esther, we talked about great white sharks that live in South Africa. Her work there, it was a fantastic interview. If you haven't seen that interview, go to speakupforblue.com/session14, it was fantastic. She's great, a woman from Scotland who dropped everything, her job with a bank and everything, she was in communications and marketing, and went down to South Africa to follow her passion. Not a scientist people, just someone who really loves conservation and the conservation of sharks in particular, and she fell in love with them when she went down there and she so just a wonderful side of them. She also volunteers with penguins which kind of inspired me to look up penguins and find out a little bit more about them. In fact, I didn't even know there were penguins in Africa. A lot of times we think about penguins, we see them living in Antarctica, we see them living on ice, and that's what we think about most of the penguins, but there are different species out there, and this one lives at the tip of Africa, so mostly South Africa, and there are great little cute little guys, it's actually quite nice. Anyway, you can check all the basics about South African penguin, if you go to speakupforblue.com/session103, and you can find out all about that. But let's talk about what influences the abundance and distribution of prey on how the abundance and distribution of prey affects influences African penguins, of Western South Africa. That's what we're looking at right now. So unfortunately, this is kind of frustrating in science. You cannot always get access to the full research paper, because if you don't have access, if you don't have a specific library or you don't have a specific way of doing it or the author is not allowed to put it out for free, you have to pay for each PDF. And to be honest, I'm a little cheap, and these papers cost like $50 each, and it's a little too much for my blood. So unfortunately, I only got the abstract, which is the summary, and gives us a lot of basis around what we want to talk about. It just takes out a lot of the methods, a lot of the results, and just pretty much offers a summary of the introduction, a summary of the results and the conclusions, but it doesn't give you the full paper, which is disappointing to me as a scientist because I really want to see this, but unfortunately, because it has to do with South Africa, and this paper is actually in, what's the journal here, African Journal of Marine Science. I just don't have access to that because I'm in Canada and a lot of the papers that I've access to are either Canadian or North American, sometimes even European, depending on what it's in. So I had to work with just the abstract here, but this was an interesting study. So apparently, what this study did is they looked at anchovy and sardine populations along the western South Africa, coast of western South Africa. And what they did is they looked at the population increase and decrease. So in 1996, there were 1 million tons of combined by a spawner biomass of these fish. So that's sardines and anchovies. There were 1 million tons in 1996. Then it rose in 2001 to 9 million, between the 1996 and 2001, it rose to 9 million tons. And then between 2001 and 2005, it decreased 4 million tons. So that means, so now this spawning biomass, that means we're talking about young of the year. When we talk about young of the years, any fish that's under a year is old, and it's quite interesting. So there's an increase and then a sharp decrease, a sharp increase and then a sharp decrease. So that was noticed so that the combined biomass of young of the year of these species increased from 0.2 million, so 200,000 tons, in 1996 to 3.2 million tons in 2001. That's a big jump. And then falling down to 0.4 million tons in 2005, a little higher than the initial one, but it's still a pretty big drop. Now there was a large eastward shift of the distribution of sardines between 1999 and 2005. So that means we're seeing a shift in actual distribution, so where they actually are. So what happens is these species, not only, there's something going on in the water that actually allow these species to spike up and then quickly drop. Now it could be food availability, it could be currents, it could be anything. These fish can go up and down depending on their environment. Unfortunately in this abstract, they didn't really say what the cause of that was. Could be climate change. You never know. It probably has to do with something with climate change, in terms of they want to go in waters that are beneficial to them and only them and that's going to help them survive. And those that don't will die off. So if you get a warm water shift or a cold water shift, they may go whichever way they want. So that's that plays a key role. So now what they know, so I'm talking about fish population, you're like, well, Andrew, we're talking about African penguins. Well, the number of African now, this is prey for African pregnant African pregnant African penguins. So the African penguins, they notice that the breeding in the Western Cape province increased, the same increase happened from 18,000 pairs of breeders to in 1996 to more than 30,000 pairs from 2001 to 2001. Now in 2005, they fell to 21,000 pairs. No, sorry. I'm sorry. I read this wrong. 18,000 pairs in 1996 increased to more than 30,000 pairs from 2001 to 2005. So there was an increase during that time. In 2006, there were only 21,000 pairs. Okay. So that means that's a big, that's a big jump. Now again, it's higher than 1996 than it was in 2006, but you can see there was a direct correlation to the biomass of the two species, sardine and anchovies, the increase in decrease with the African penguin breeding pairs, right? So they both increased from 1996 to 2001, and then they both decreased after 2006. So what they're saying is that, you know, basically they kind of go up and down with the food availability, which is a classic sort of food web model. When there's more fish, there's going to be more penguins, right, especially what they like. If there's less fish, there's going to be less penguins. So it's kind of interesting in that it directly correlates to those two species. In other words, they are really directly related to those two species, not other fish species. So if their food is scarce, if those two species are scarce, they will not be able to find other species that will really allow them to keep growing or kind of continue where they are. They also noticed that the breeding was mainly attributable to the, hold on a second, yeah, so they said the decrease was probably high mortality because it was just that they died off because they just didn't have the food available. Now they noticed when the food wasn't available, there was a delayed first breeding, an abstinence from breeding during periods of food shortage. So that when they don't breed, that means they might increase, so there's food as scarce, the food scarce, they don't breed and they abstain from breeding and it's probably so that there's more food available for the penguins that are living, right. So it increases survivorship when food is scarce and enables seabirds to rapidly take advantage of improved feeding conditions. So when the feeding conditions actually improve, then they start to go out, they start to eat and then they start to get, they start to breed, okay, they start to get a little freesky. So they take advantage of those kind of conditions. And it's just interesting, so they're saying although long-lived seabirds are buffered against short-term variability in food supplies, environmental change that influences the abundance and availability of prey can have severe consequences for central place foragers such as penguins. If there is long-term displacement of prey to regions where no suitable breeding localities occur. So what that means is if the birds, if the penguins don't have food, if there's a food shortage, then all of a sudden the tide switch or the water switches and all of a sudden the sardine and anchovies leave for a long-term and they're in a high, a very likeable breeding area. Well, they can't stay with the breed, they can't stay there, they have to move, but there's no other suitable breeding spot. So now their whole population is going to change because they can't find the right conditions. If they're in a good breeding spot and the food is there, they're going to survive, they're going to do really well. So now what does this mean in the future? Well, when you have environmental factors that are really influencing this problem, so if you have pollution, you have sedimentation, you have overfishing of sardines and anchovies, climate change playing, all these cumulative effects playing a role in shaping the population of the anchovy and sardine species, most likely decreasing these species, you're going to have a severe effect on these penguins which are already considered vulnerable. On Tuesday, if you remember correctly, we talked about how the penguins, when they breed, they basically nest and they, to build their nest, they use their own crap, right? They call guano, basically they use their own feces to build their nest. However, what people have determined, what people have found, like humans have found, is that their guano, their crap, is actually good for fertilizing. So it's good for fertilizing agricultural crops. So what happens is the birds will build these nests, people will come by and they will take those nests and walk off with them and use them for fertilizer or infertilizer to make them enriched. Problem is that nest is gone, they can't, they can't house their, the mum and dad can't house the eggs and they can't reproduce, right? So there's been a, there's been a big decrease just from that human population. So you have the human factor on there, right, on a vulnerable, that's made the species vulnerable, and then you have a bunch of environmental factors that are affecting the whereabouts and the distribution of the sardine and anchovy, they're too prime prey, and it's affecting that spatial activity, so it's especially where they are. So if those anchovies go away and those sardines go away and you have pressure from human population taking away their nests, now you've got a population that's in trouble and that's a bad thing. So what this does, what this paper does that says, look, not only do you have to, they have to manage things on the human side to say, hey, we can't take these nests because this species is vulnerable, vulnerable, but what we have to do is we have to go out and we have to manage their prey, properly, and we have to monitor their prey more. Because once that population dips, then this population is in trouble, it's already vulnerable, we don't want to get into more trouble, right? We may not have anything to do about it, but we may have some problems in the future. So it's good for monitoring purposes and managing management. So if the fish population goes away, the management of the birds on land and people taking their nests has to really be restricted, right, to protect them, to help them survive as much as possible. So basically when the food goes away, they go into like survivor mode, they barely eat, they don't reproduce, so that's putting their population on stress. So you got to take away any other stress that can affect them that you can manage, right? So that's usually what the people, you got to manage the people. In that respect, let the environmental conditions kind of work themselves out. Then once the food comes back, the population starts to grow, maybe you can ease up on the management a little bit, but not too much, right, because it is a vulnerable species. So that's what this paper really does, and that's what I wanted you guys to understand is the way we manage things, the way we manage a species or a number of species, a community of species or a habitat, really depends on the cumulative impacts of that habitat. So that means the amount of factors, whether it be environmental or human, that are affecting that specific habitat or community or whatever the subject matter might be, whatever that management priority might be. And that's how we manage things. We have to take away the stuff that we can control. We have to restrict and regulate the stuff that we can control, and then allow the stuff that we can't control to kind of just play out and allow evolution to take place, right, because a lot of species have survived with just the regular environmental conditions, not the fact that we overfish, not the fact that we develop on the coast, not the fact that we add more stuff into the, I guess I'd say crap, but stuff into the water, add all that stuff in. You're talking about cumulative effects, which can really degrade a habitat because it really puts in that long term degradation, right? We talked about it last Thursday, where we talked about coral reefs, and when a cyclone hits, it's not that bad. It's actually good for the species or good for coral reefs because they can rebuild, they can breathe, they can move around, they can breathe, they actually recover. But they don't recover as well when there's other factors that are chronically attacking it, water quality, sedimentation, overfishing, mining, like dumping dredgerate for mining, that always affects constantly what's happening. If you think about the analogy would be for us, if some say something got happened like an event, say you got hit by a car, you got hit by a car, you're going to need to recover, you're going to be in the hospital, you're going to need to recover. Well, if you were chronically getting sick with a cold, a flu, pneumonia, all that stuff, that's going to affect your recovery. You're not going to recover as fast because your body is too busy fighting off the viruses that are inside you. You're not going to recover, your bones aren't going to heal as fast, things aren't going to feel as good as you recover. It's going to take longer and eventually some of the things may not work out and you may perish because of it. Same thing in the environment, same thing in the ocean, it happens the same way. I just want to talk about this research paper on African Penguins because I thought it was important to really pull that message out there. It's good to know this science because we really see how the predator prey relationship between penguins and anchovies and sardines really take place in how closely they're linked and how the management of penguins can be managed by sardines and anchovies by monitoring sardines and anchovies, which might be a little easier or vice versa, which might be a little easier. That's the episode for today. Again, like I said, we're all about the conservation message and letting people know what's happening. I hope you find this interesting. Please let me know on the show notes and the comments. Let me know if you find this stuff interesting. You can go to speakupforblue.com/session105 and you can just put it on the comments and say, "Hey, Andrew, I really enjoy this." Or, "Hey, can we talk about another subject or what about this species and all that?" Maybe I can add on. You can also actually connect with me through audio by going to www.speakupforblue.com/connect. That will allow you to leave a voicemail through your computer and you can ask me questions. You can leave comments on the podcast and maybe if you're nice enough, I'll put it on the podcast. You can say how you like the podcast, how you find it interesting. Even if you have a criticism, that's fine. I don't mind. I might put it on there. As long as it's not vulgar, please keep it clean as possible because we're trying to make this a family show. Thank you very much. You've been listening to, oh, and also, if you want to support our Patreon campaign, you can do so, our crowdfunding campaign. You can do so at speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. You can actually go on and put in a level of support. There are different levels of support per month, remember? Each one comes with a different incentive. The more you do it, the more people who support us, the closer we get to our goals of spreading this conservation message over different platforms. Over video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, and also over the digital magazine sort of platform. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to hit almost every platform and grow this into a movement, a conservation movement. We thank you for those who are supporting. Really appreciate it. If you want to support speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. You've been listening to Speakup for Blue Podcasts. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy Research. Thursday is the weekend is almost here. Tomorrow we've got Nathan Johnson joining us on Ocean Talks Friday, and we're going to talk about how people are talking about how the earth is flat. Believe it or not, that's back. I don't know if it ever went away, but it's back. But anyway, thank you for listening. Happy conservation. (upbeat music)