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CAPE TOWN (AFP) – Penguins waddle over giant boulders and club into the alter turquoise sea to the delight of camera-ready tourists nearby the counsel of South Africa.

The birds are a top magnet in Simon's Town, a naval community in Cape Town where motorists consent to the seabirds, but their drawing are dwindling, a bedevilment factor that also points to wider threats to the world's oceans.

"The individualist Penguins hit been decreasing, by 60 percent now, since 2004, so that's ground we are every rattling worried," said Lorien Pichegru of the soldier FitzPatrick Institute of individualist Ornithology.

"There's 26,000 pairs mitt and that's the minimal sort ever recorded. At the beginning of the 20th century we had more than digit meg birds."

Scientists call penguins an indicator species: digit that is easy to guardian and can also point to belief and wider problems in the ocean.

Africa's nesting penguins were reclassified as endangered last year after their drawing were nearly wiped out, probable as a result of rivalry for matter from advertizement fisheries and movement fish stocks.

The flightless birds, famous for their "tuxedo" plumage and their comical walks, mainly take anchovies and sardines and only lineage in southern Namibia and South Africa.

But dynamical fish patterns hit unnatural them to movement farther to encounter matter and even establish newborn nesting areas much as at Simons Town's Boulders Beach, where a unify arrived in the 1980s, and backward to Robben Island, famous for the prison that held Nelson Mandela.

"Food is digit of the large threats, if not the large threat," said Rob Crawford of South Africa's division of environmental affairs, pointing to a 600-kilometre (375-mile) shift in the migration path of sardines.

"Penguins cannot move that farther to feed their chicks and then at the modify of nurture they've got to alter up to moult as well," he said.

Birdlife International has warned that the individualist Penguin, digit of the world's 18 penguin species, is edging fireman to extinction.

To prevent the slide, it has titled for investigate into the personalty of status change and possible no-fishing zones around island colonies.

A 20-kilometre (12-mile) trawling forbiddance around the world's large body on St Croix island in Algoa Bay, easterly of Cape Town, allowed nearly three-quarters of birds there to kibosh having to attain effortful long-haul hunts, investigate showed last year.

Healthy populations of the seabird would ordinarily withstand raids by egg-stealing gulls and hunters like seals, cats, dogs or wild predators.

But the accumulation concerns stingy that every individualist is today seen as critical, and oiled, scraped and abandoned chicks are rescued. Last year 49 babies were flown soured an Algoa island due to threats of algid weather.

Rehabilitation is flourishing "because the birds are so spirited and they are healthy to survive after the promulgation (from captivity)," Southern individualist Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds boss Venessa Strauss told AFP.

The non-profit Cape Town-based organisation treats around 1,000 penguins annually, including around 500 birds groomed in oil.

"It's bigger than the penguins. It's most the upbeat of our marine ecosystem," said Strauss, enclosed by solemn saved adults from the species once famous as Jackass penguins because of their clamorous brays.

"A lot of pore is on the penguins but at the modify of the period it's most the ecosystem. The marine ecosystem is taking strain and the penguins are meet really telling a part of the story," she said.

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