Both penguin studies related to the St Croix and Bird Island groups in Algoa Bay, adjacent to the city of Gqeberha, which are home to half the world’s remaining population of African penguins.
Tayla Gifford’s (nee Ginsburg’s) presentation took a socio-economic perspective. Titled “Shared seas, shared challenges - How do we protect penguins and support people?”, her talk was a snapshot of her master’s thesis with which she graduated cum laude in 2019.
Victoria Stockdale’s presentation was more focused on algorithmic modelling. It was also based on her master’s thesis, a 2023 MSc in Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography, which integrated state-space modelling and systematic conservation planning to recommend penguin fishery management zones in the bay.
Gifford explained the background to her research. The numbers of African penguins have declined so drastically over the past century, they are now classified as critically endangered and face extinction. These penguins exist in the same area as the purse-seine fishing industry, which uses large nets to catch small fish, and which provides livelihoods to thousands and supplies sardines to both the local and export market.
“That poses the very important question - how do we manage this shared virtual space to balance both their needs?” said Gifford.
Her study had three main aims:
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to map penguin-fishery overlap;
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understand fishers’ perceptions; and
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assess dynamic ocean management for marine social planning.
Her methodology included penguin global positioning system (GPS) tracking data, fishery catch data, estimates of fish biomass from a fishfinder attached to a boat, and semi-structured interviews with both fishermen and managers in fish factories.
Gifford pointed out that the marine protected areas in the maps in her presentation were proclaimed in 2019, after her study had been completed. During her research, from 2011 to 2015, fishing exclusion zones were being trialed in the bay. They were referred to as closed or open zones, with a 20km exclusion zone around either St Croix or Bird islands.
The ultimate aim of her research, Gifford said, was “to highlight that to protect penguins doesn't mean you have to sacrifice all the income and livelihoods, rather that fishermen should be included as partners within the actual climate process and conservation”.
The second speaker on penguins, Stockdale, said her research aimed “to design dynamic fishing exclusion zones that reduce the overlap with purse-seine fishery to maximise penguin foraging success”.
She used two methodologies. The first was the statistical hidden Markov model (HMM) to infer the penguins’ behavioural states - foraging, commuting and transitioning - on feeding trips. Her research collated 323 948 GPS records from 462 trips. The other method was systematic conservation planning (SCP), which incorporated this model of feeding behaviour into penguin fishery spatial management recommendations.
“We identified areas where penguins were performing specific behaviours. And this was really new. We identified specific sites for closure so that you could avoid uniform exclusion sites, and that was to improve stakeholder engagement. And then from that we developed dynamic closure,” she said.
Her study’s constraints challenges included the need for more variables, such as incorporating the fish biomass near the colonies, which would identify specific areas.
Her research also highlighted the need to use real-time data, rather than data collected after the breeding season had ended. The complexity and cost of doing this, said Stockdale, “represents a significant logistical challenge, but it is crucial”.
Her thesis suggested using video and telemetry data – collected and transmitted from remote sources - to validate the penguins’ inferred behavioural state against the true observed behaviour at that time, and using that date to delineate real-time, dynamic closures.
“If you can increase the amount of energy expended on foraging success to improve breeding, then marrying that biological insight with socio-economic data, we can show the fishing industry that outside closures are smart, temporary and minimally disruptive,” Stockdale said at the symposium, which was held on Nelson Mandela University’s Ocean Sciences campus from 12 to 14 November 2025.