Gannets and vampires

Time for some birds

South Africa: Gannets Face a Sea of Troubles

Morus capensis
Photo by Dirty John Bonny

Decline of fish stocks of sardines and anchovies are threatening the Cape Gannets, penguins, and cormorants in South Africa and Namibia.

The birds face numerous threats, from competition with human fishing, to an unexplained shift in fish populations. The gannets at Lamberts Bay are also threatened by predation by seals:

The seals, also suffering from a shortage of fish, have increased their formerly occasional predations sharply, killing several hundred adult gannets at Lambert's Bay in 2005 and forcing the birds to abandon this colony, until CapeNature drew them back by employing a sharpshooter to kill predating seals and using decoy birds.

News of yet another species of plant or animal under threat seems, at times, to be hardly news. But this one has a personal angle. I visited Lamberts Bay and saw these birds in 2004.

Himself.


More gannets.

Buphagus erythrorhynchus
Red-billed oxpecker, atop
Syncerus caffer,
a Cape Buffalo
Photo by Dirty John Bonny

We saw oxpeckers on Cape Buffalo while on the same trip. We're all familiar with the just-so story about how these birds are happy symbionts with their large mammilian hosts.

See, they really eat blood mostly. And skin, earwax and snot. But you didn't want to know that, did you.


At Tetrapod Zoology comes some wonderful speculations that Oxpeckers are on their way to being vampires.

...they feed on blood and the other tissues of their hosts ... and we can now doubt the idea that they are always symbiotic 'friends' of the mammals they clamber about on.