Eighty endangered African penguins have been found covered in oil on the southern Cape coast - probably from swimming through illegally dumped oily waste by vessels at sea.
This comes after the United Nations declared the Cape coast a "special area", with added legal protection against oil pollution, which came into effect on August 1.
The international legislation makes it an offence for ships to clean out their cargo or "slops" tanks or to dump oily waste in the sea from Lambert's Bay to East London, up to 135 nautical miles out to sea.
The oiled penguins are evidence of the difficulty of enforcing the new legislation, as the authorities say vessels often dump oily waste at night, offshore, and are long gone by the time the slick is detected.
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African penguin numbers have plummeted in the past few decades, and the species is facing the threat of extinction.
Vanessa Strauss, head of the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob), said the drop in penguin numbers was an indication that the ocean ecosystem was not healthy, which would have economic implications for the country.
The oiled birds were rescued by CapeNature and Overstrand Municipality and taken to Sanccob in Tableview. When oiled, seabirds lose their natural waterproofing, exposing their skin to the cold. Because of this, the penguins do not go to sea to fish and starve to death.
"Most of these came from Dyer Island and Stoney Point at Betty's Bay.
"The public thinks penguins get oiled only when there are massive oil spills, but every year we deal with oiled birds.
"Apart from oil, there is over-fishing and climate change which is affecting the migration of fish, the penguins' food source, and they have to compete with seals for breeding grounds.
"All this adds up and the population is crashing.
"At the end of the day this affects us, because it shows that we are not looking after our oceans," Strauss said.
Captain Saleem Modak, acting head of the South African Maritime Safety Authority's (Samsa) centre for seawatch and response, said on Tuesday that enforcing the new UN legislation was a joint effort between Samsa and the department of environment affairs.
He said the new international regulations had been widely circulated and ships were aware of it.
"You will always have those who don't obey the rules, and even the rich countries cannot have 24-hour surveillance. We've caught a few so far, and if people are not going to heed the necessity of protecting the marine environment, we will become very tough," Modak said.
He said prosecuting those who broke environmental laws had been far easier and more effective when there was the environmental court in Hermanus.
- This article was originally published on page 3 of Cape Times on August 13, 2008
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