In search of South Africa’s ‘Marine Big Five’

I listened as people talked to penguins at Boulders Beach, but the humans rarely made more sense than the birds. From a crowded boardwalk overhanging the famous colony in Simon’s Town, just outside Cape Town, the tourists leaned over barriers, quizzing and cajoling African penguins as they bumbled between the surf and their burrows in the undergrowth. Some people walked into each other while reviewing seconds-old footage on their smartphones, while some penguins walked into each other because they were penguins.

It was a warm Sunday, the crowd was international, and the penguins’ appeal seemed universal. Everyone quickly became children together: some laughed, some cried, and some had tantrums when they couldn’t see as well as their playmates. Extraordinary things were said in all kinds of languages. A standout was a Canadian woman who menaced one bird with: “I’ll take you to Canada,” before adding in a baby voice: “We have so much snow there.”

I hoped the warm-weather bird didn’t understand this threat of an icy death, but given that an estimated 1mn people come to this particular colony in an average year, it was likely to have heard worse. As well as all the visitors, its rampant popularity has seen the African penguin named part of the Marine Big Five, a list of remarkable coastal fauna found around the Western Cape.

The original safari Big Five was compiled to note how dangerous the lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino were to hunters. The Marine Big Five instead shifts the focus from land to the water, and from threat to awe. The African penguin is probably the most accessible creature on the list, closely followed by the Cape fur seal. There’s more timing and luck required to see fellow listees, the common dolphin and the southern right whale, though the numbers of both are thought to be on the rise. The same cannot be said for the final and most notorious member, the great white shark. However, as I found out over a week in the region, neither infamy nor cuteness are guarantees of a future for animals on the list.

From Simon’s Town, I drove to the north of the city, out to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) and its avian hospital. The centre takes in all kinds of seabirds, but the penguins are its rock stars and most profitable mascots. They are also perhaps the birds most in need of aid.

“Life isn’t so easy as an African penguin,” said Dr David Roberts, the centre’s clinical vet. “There were already problems with their fishing grounds and their population has been declining rapidly. There’s been evidence of predation from fur seals, too. There are many factors, and now we have avian flu.” About a century ago there were thought to be as many as 1.5mn of the birds, while today’s free-falling population is estimated to be roughly just 30,000. Despite the outpouring of love, the African penguin faces functional extinction in the next 10 to 15 years.

We were speaking just outside an enclosure in which a couple of dozen penguins were milling around, preening and pratfalling. Some had bright bandages on their flippers or feet, covering wounds likely inflicted by fur seals. Overall, they appeared as most penguins do, which is to say incompetent, unenthusiastic about cleanliness and in need of a nanny. Luckily, said Roberts, they had shown remarkable resilience when it came to the highly pathogenic strain of avian flu that has been rampaging around the world for the last couple of years. Local terns and cormorants hadn’t been so lucky, but for reasons unknown, penguins — here and globally — have largely been spared.

Before I got a chance to really celebrate this fact with the vet, he told me about more misfortune. In 2021, 63 African penguins from the Boulders Beach colony were stung to death by bees. This upsetting incident was originally a mystery — the birds were all adults and appeared otherwise healthy — until Roberts and his team investigated as though it were a crime, only cracking the case when they returned to the site of the attack and found dozens of dead bees in the sand. “There’d never been a record of anything like that happening before,” said the vet. “Like I said: it’s hard for these little guys.”

High on a hill just outside the coastal town of Gansbaai, it felt like the Marine Big Five and perhaps all South Africa’s coastal megafauna might be visible. A savage sweep of untamed shore forms the eastern border of Walker Bay, and tucked up in the sprawling fynbos, the Grootbos Private Nature Reserve drinks in the view.

I’d come to this property — part hotel, part nature conservancy, part art gallery — to track down more of the Marine Big Five, but the austral spring had brought storms and tumult to the ocean. From the hotel’s restaurant, the sea appeared to be smoking and there would be no chance to get out for wildlife viewing. Instead, I was taken around the property by Ruaan Barnard, a driver and guide who seemed to have his mind blown as often as mine when describing rare plants and animals found on site.

He explained that Grootbos had started in 1991 as a simple guesthouse, but that it now spanned 3,500 hectares and could rightly be described as one of southern Africa’s great rewilding projects. From sourcing much of its restaurant food around the property, to replanting endemic flora, to training young locals as ecologists, it went far beyond some greenwashed vanity project. “The foundation is buying more land now,” said the guide with this toffee-thick Afrikaans accent. “Not to expand or develop, but so it can protect more of the environment here.”

Each time we went out into the fynbos, it seemed the rampaging plants were threatening to swallow the unsealed roads. Spring may have brought unsettled weather, but it had also gilded the land with rolling carpets of flowers.

There are thought to be more than 8,500 species of plants making up the fynbos around the Western Cape (907 have been recorded at Grootbos). To put that in context, the UK only has roughly 3,500 recognised plants, more than half of which are non-native. This very particular African ecosystem — regarded as one of the world’s six distinct floral kingdoms — sees endemism and biodiversity intertwined in such complex ways that it is still not fully understood.

We walked through a great plant corridor, bees and bugs as delighted by the bloom as we were, with Barnard pointing out a dizzying number of flowers. There were eruptions of orange and yellow, intense expressions of pink and purple, and white petals so tightly bunched they could have been cauliflower, were they not so much more beautiful. The air itself felt alive.

After a couple of days lost in the floral kingdom, it was time to return to the salt of the sea. The ocean had calmed down sufficiently for Grootbos to arrange trips with aquatic tours company Marine Dynamics to spot fleeting dolphins, migratory southern right whales and unfathomable numbers of cape fur seals.

Within half an hour of leaving, common dolphins flashed through our wake, while whales were so docile that waves broke across their immense backs while they appeared to sunbathe. Their numbers are slowly returning from the disastrous lows from the whaling era, and they now arrive with welcome predictability between June and September. Vast and slow-moving, spotting them from a tourist boat is today no more difficult than it would have been for lethally efficient harpooners in the 19th century.

While the recovery of the right whales is to be celebrated, the fur seals have shot far beyond that, bouncing back with such force that their abundance now puts pressure on other species. In recent years there have been reports of seals disembowelling penguins to steal fish from their stomachs, rather than go foraging themselves. From the whale watching boat, I watched the noisy pinnipeds crowd beaches and hang from shipwrecks like raggedy protesters, their case already won, barking now in what might have been triumph.

Their population was already soaring, but the sudden decline of the Marine Big Five’s most infamous member has handed an even larger advantage to the seals. Prior to leaving Grootbos, I spoke to marine biologist Alison Towner, who studies great white sharks in and around Walker Bay. Not long after beginning work on her PhD, the focus of her research had to quickly change, thanks to two killer whales that had developed a taste for shark liver. “We’d brought in new tech, new methods, all ready to study white sharks in a new way — and then in 2017, the orcas arrived,” said Towner. Dubbed Port and Starboard, these vicious buccaneers have spent the past few years raiding the coast and devastating not just the shark populations, but the cage-diving industry that had long been established around them.

“We started to notice big sharks washing up around False Bay and Cape Town, opened up, eviscerated, livers gone. Orcas are known for being that selective, but it had never been seen before,” continued Towner, explaining that the liver of a white shark makes up about a third of its body weight.

The knock-on effects of the demise of the white sharks goes far beyond boosting the fur seal population. As the fish have fled the orca, there have been increased numbers of bite incidents with surfers and swimmers off beaches where sharks were only rarely spotted previously. Back in Gansbaai, meanwhile, the effect on tourism has been devastating. The self-styled shark-cage diving capital of the world has been running out of sharks.

Or at least running out of those particular sharks. Sitting down for a briefing at the Marine Dynamics headquarters, our group was told that while our chances of seeing great whites would be virtually zero, we’d instead see bronze whaler sharks. It was almost possible to hear eyebrows raising around the room — bronze even sounds like a consolation prize — but there were still nervous murmurings of excitement, and the boat was close to full when we bounced out to an anchorage off Dyer Island.

Shy albatross, giant petrels and gulls beyond count swooped around our boat as the chumming of the water began. Within minutes, the sharks had gathered to check out the offal-strewn ocean. As their coppery fins incised the sea, we mammals regressed, all bared teeth and panic noises like macaques raising a jungle alarm. Moments later, there was a collective gasp, then silence as a colossal, short-tail stingray more than 4 metres in diameter briefly emerged from the depths, surfaced, then disappeared.

Capable of growing to 3 metres in length and weighing 300kg, the bronze whaler is still a big old fish in its own right which, unlike the individualist great whites, likes to gather in menacing schools. They are also very capable of killing a person, though only a single fatality has ever been reported.

I briefly wondered if this sort of deadly reputation would be enough to see the bronze whaler replace the great white as one of the Marine Big Five, or whether perhaps the hepatically fixated orca had already taken its place. But then it was my turn to jump in the water and soon my thoughts were of nothing but jaws rushing through the cataract. The sharks weren’t white, but that didn’t mean they weren’t great. Watching them slide around, above and below me, as graceful as they were deadly, the only list I hoped they avoided was the orcas’ menu.

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