The first time I visited St Croix island, in 2017, it was home to about 6,000 breeding pairs of African penguins – 35 percent of the global population of this endangered species.

On a blissful September morning, we sped across Algoa Bay on South Africa’s east coast, past a grimy cargo ship and the bulging meringue that is the Nelson Mandela Bay football stadium, before stopping alongside St Croix. The boat rocked from side to side as waves broke against the tiny, jagged outcrop that has wrecked many a ship over the centuries.

To the human eye, the rocky, sun-baked pinprick seemed a pretty inhospitable place but birds clearly saw things differently. A waddling throng of knee-high penguins huddled above the high-water mark while, behind them, a lone gull perched on a replica of the cross erected by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488.

As we rounded the island, the huge Ngqura Port and its floating fuel stations came into view. In 2017, the practice of ship-to-ship bunkering (refuelling at sea) had only been going for one year. Back then, the biggest concern about bunkering was that it would result in oil spills. While there have been four spills – in 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2022 – some of which killed penguins, the noise caused by the bunkering activities is likely even more devastating to the birds.

“In a bid to avoid the noise, the penguins swim further, to less productive feeding grounds. This means they can’t build up enough reserves to survive the moult, when they have to fast for three weeks,” explains Lorien Pichegru, an adjunct professor at Nelson Mandela University, who has been studying the penguins on St Croix since 2008.

Since 2017, largely due to ship-to-ship bunkering, the number of birds using St Croix each season has dropped by 90 percent. Put another way, in the years since then, St Croix has gone from being the world’s largest African penguin colony to being one of the smallest.

“The island looks completely different these days,” says Pichegru. “It’s not just empty, it’s also covered with plants. Penguins use all sorts of material to make their nests, so on this bare rock island, plants were luxury they were fighting for. Now there are no penguins and the plants have made a comeback.”

The solution is simple, says Pichegru: “Bunkering should not be allowed.” Ships use it to avoid paying port fees and it provides “a cheap refuelling loophole” which deprives the country of tax money and causes untold environmental damage.

The good news is that it is not too late to save the St Croix colony. In October 2023, all three bunkering companies had their licences suspended over tax irregularities. As soon as the bunkering stopped, the penguins started coming back.

In the 2023 breeding season, when bunkering was still in full swing, about 700 breeding pairs used the island. This year, with bunkering on hold, that number has almost doubled to 1,350 breeding pairs.

But the moratorium is only temporary. This February, the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) announced that it would be processing new bunkering applications “without delay”.

Bunkering has not resumed yet but the conservation community is already engaging with the government about a legal loophole that allows applications to be “approved without any environmental scrutiny of the risks and impacts associated with bunkering”, says Kate Handley, the executive director of the Biodiversity Law Centre.

The bigger picture

It isn’t just St Croix – overall, African penguins, the continent’s only penguin species, are in a precarious position.

At the turn of the last century, between 1.5 million and 3 million birds roamed the coastlines of Namibia and South Africa. That number has plummeted to 9,900 breeding pairs – a 99 percent decline in 120 years, says Alistair McInnes, who heads up the Seabird Conservation programme at BirdLife South Africa. At the current rate of decline, which is 7.9 percent annually, the African penguin will go extinct in the wild by 2035.

Bunkering is not the only reason for the penguins’ peril – but it is arguably the easiest to address.

From the 1840s onwards, guano collection for the fertiliser industry had a devastating impact on seabird colonies the world over. Dyer Island, on South Africa’s east coast, used to be home to more than a million African penguins who nested in the 4-6 metre (13.19 ft) layer of guano that coated the island. Now the guano is gone and just 2,040 pairs used the island in the 2023 breeding season.

What’s more, between 1920 and 1950, a taste for penguin eggs (they were served on the Titanic and in South Africa’s parliament) saw approximately 48 percent of African penguin eggs being eaten by humans.

More recently, overfishing – the penguins feed almost exclusively on pelagic fish, like sardines and anchovies – and climate change, which has led to habitat loss and made breeding increasingly difficult, have had a similarly devastating impact on the birds. In 1999, there were approximately 43,000 breeding pairs but by 2016, that number had dropped to 17,200.

In the eight years since, the South African penguin population has more than halved.

In a desperate attempt to save the species, BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB (a South African NGO focused on the protection of seabirds) has taken South Africa’s minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment to court (PDF) for failing to implement biologically meaningful fishing closures about six penguin colonies (including St Croix), which are home to 76 percent of the global African penguin population.

The new environment minister, who got the job after the ANC failed to win an outright majority in this year’s general election, has signalled his intent to settle the case out of court and implement the closures.

The decision to petition the courts – which Handley stresses “was not taken lightly” – came after the minister ignored some of the key recommendations made by an international review panel she appointed. The case will be heard in the Pretoria High Court in October this year.

Ecologically speaking, says McInnes, “losing the penguins would be a disaster as they are an indicator species for the entire ecosystem”.

It would also be devastating for the South African tourism industry: A 2018 study showed that the flagship colony at Cape Town’s Boulders Beach contributed 311 million rand ($17m) per annum to the local economy. Cape Town remains the only city in the world where penguins waddle the streets, but for how long?

In their bid to stave off extinction, Pichegru, Handley and McInnes are leaving no stone unturned – and ensuring that bunkering never returns to Algoa Bay is an important part of their strategy.

Spotlight on bunkering

Ship-to-ship bunkering allows large ships to refuel at sea, thus avoiding the cost and inconvenience of coming into port. Before 2016, bunkering did not take place anywhere along the South African coastline. Since then, three licences have been granted in Algoa Bay, with some operations taking place within 10km (6.2 miles) of St Croix and at the heart of a biodiversity hotspot. In addition to being the bottlenose dolphin capital of the world, Algoa Bay is home to endangered humpback dolphins and is a popular calving ground for several species of whale.

Pichegru points out that “we cannot make a direct causal link between bunkering and the decrease of penguins” as the immense stress the St Croix colony is under prevents her from carrying out the studies required to prove the link incontrovertibly. But the evidence for the prosecution is damning.

A 2017 study led by Pichegru proved that African penguins clearly avoid noise generated by the seismic surveys – the most intense man-made ocean noise in the world – conducted by companies prospecting for undersea oil and gas deposits. By distancing themselves from the source of noise, the penguins end up in unproductive waters, with limited opportunities to find food.

Pichegru’s 2022 paper estimated that the noise levels in the foraging habitat of St Croix penguins have doubled since bunkering, which increased maritime traffic in the bay, began. As she writes, “Algoa Bay is now one of the noisiest bays in the world.”

The only way of proving conclusively that bunkering is the cause for the St Croix penguins’ demise is to fit penguins with GPS trackers and correlate their movements with real-time noise readings from underwater hydrophones, which are currently recording close to St Croix and Bird Island.

But the St Croix birds have always been very difficult to work with – the island sees very few visitors so birds are not habituated to humans, explains Pichegru, “and now that there are so few penguins left, we can’t put GPS on them.

“With the animals so stressed already it would only make matters worse,” she adds. “As a scientist it is very frustrating to not be able to do my job.”

Meanwhile, Handley and her legal team are focused on closing a legal loophole that allows applications for a bunkering license to be made without an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

“Bunkering had never happened in South Africa,” explains Handley, “So it wasn’t listed as a Listed Activity [one that requires an EIA] when the law was promulgated.” She is hopeful the law will eventually be changed to include bunkering on the list but she is also aware this may take years – time that the St Croix penguins simply do not have.

There have been some other legal developments. In the wake of the 2019 oil spill, a moratorium on new bunkering applications was imposed, pending the completion of an Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) commissioned by Transnet, the state-owned company in charge of ports, rails and pipelines. And in 2021, with the ERA still ongoing, SAMSA released a Bunkering Code of Practice for public comment. This has undergone several revisions since, with the environmental safeguards progressively watered down with each new draft.

The ERA, whose recommendations are not legally binding, was eventually published for public feedback in late 2023.

“We commented extensively, fundamentally expressing the concern that the ERA was inadequate,” says Handley, “But critically noting that despite inadequacies, based on what appears in the ERA, bunkering should not be permitted in Algoa Bay.”

Handley has received little feedback to her many letters – despite undertakings from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment that bunkering is receiving their attention. Publicly, SAMSA announced, in February this year that it would resume processing new bunkering applications “without delay”.

There are no current legal barriers to bunkering. Pichegru hopes that the tax issues previously encountered by the bunkering operators deter future applicants, or that the new environment minister intervenes as he did this year by deciding to settle the fisheries lawsuit brought by BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB.

And she still has some hope: “African penguins can bounce back,” she stresses. “Uniquely for seabirds, they can lay two clutches of two eggs per season. If we just leave them be, they can come back.

“They don’t have to be extinct by 2035.”