The population of African Penguins has declined by 99% in the past 120 years, leaving less than 10,000 breeding pairs currently in existence across South Africa.
One area of focus is the impact of overfishing on penguin foraging areas and the subsequent need to implement meaningful island closures around at-risk penguin colonies.
Massmart has therefore partnered with Bird Life SA (BLSA) in a project to implement real-time tracking and weighbridge technology at important penguin colonies, to gather data such as distance travelled, time spent foraging for food, and weight gained or lost. This data provides a unique insight into both fishery health and the interdependent impact on the health and survivability of penguin colonies.
Through the newly launched and Massmart funded website, penguinalert.org, interested members of the public now also have access to this data. Commenting on Massmart’s motivation to be a part of this project, Viratha Hariram, Massmart Senior Environmental Sustainability Manager says, “Penguins play an incredible role in our ecosystem as an indicator species. This means that their health and their survival rates are a direct reflection of the conditions of their surrounding habitat. Working with BLSA, we have developed the Penguin Alert website to increase awareness on the causes of the declining penguin population and to showcase the research that BLSA are doing to reverse this decline. On the website, members of the public can learn more about the tracking systems, see important stats from different penguin colonies and view the penguins via live webcams.”
This project with Bird Life SA is an extension of Massmart’s existing marine conservation initiatives which include being the first local retailer to conduct genetic identity testing across all its private brand seafood products, towards ensuring that Massmart is not supplied with red listed or critically endangered seafood species.
