Africa's Beautiful Marine Life

Writer Shamiso Banda (MSc Zoology, working in Conservation and Idea Specialist at Styra Yacho) Curator?Tadiwa ,?Styra Yacho

If you want a bit of background on me and why I’m writing this, continue reading this paragraph. If you would rather go straight to the core of this article, you can jump to the next paragraph. Do you appreciate that I gave you the option? The practice of having something for everyone makes for a better world, in my opinion. Anyway, for those who continued here, “Hi! I appreciate your interest in me as a person.” The first tangible thought of my love for nature is when I won a gift card in grade 1 and chose to get two books – one was on trees and the other was on animals. Not long after, part of my family moved to Renco Mine near Masvingo and I started birdwatching there. It was beautiful! The next significant moment I can think of is when I decided to do my high school science project on snails. Honestly, I don’t remember what drove me to snails specifically but hey, I did a science project on an animal. Based on all this, is it really such a coincidence that I ended up in the field of studying animals?! It’s funny because I’ve wanted to be so many different things as I’ve grown, but who I am now was never one of them. I thought about being a journalist, a doctor, or even an accountant (before I actually did the subject) but never a zoologist. That could very possibly be because I didn’t know such a thing existed for a long time. Now, I’m a Master of Science in Zoology, and my specific area of research has been around aspects of marine ornithology (seabirds). I’m also a conservationist because I can’t stand the idea of letting the world walk into an ecological catastrophe as if it’s a brick wall we cannot see. So, my name is Shamiso Banda, and the path of my life has led me here, to the point of feeling the need to shout on a global scale that we need a game plan that matches the scale of global issues because we don’t have one right now and that is unacceptable.

This past week I attended the Southern African Marine Science Symposium 2022 , a conference where thought leaders across Africa met, discussed their research, and had a good time. This was my first in-person conference and I loved it. When my mentor sent me an email with the opportunity to present at this conference, I decided to submit all my research – three studies with Sooty Albatrosses as the focal species. For those that don’t know, the Sooty Albatross is a seabird species – they breed on islands in the middle of the ocean and spend their lifetimes out there. The sea/ocean is their home, so to speak. All my postgraduate research has been on them, at the Marine Apex Predator Research Unit in the Zoology department at Nelson Mandela University .

Back to the present - to my delight, all three of my abstracts were accepted and I got the opportunity to stand on stage and speak on how warm temperatures affect the diet of Sooty Albatrosses through its influence on cephalopods, the foraging behavior of Sooty Albatrosses during environmental variability, and the attraction of Sooty Albatrosses and White-chinned Petrels to fishing activity. In a nutshell: warm temperatures reduce the availability of what they eat most (squid), and in such cases they eat whatever else is available. That’s good news, if the change in diet will not negatively affect them. We don’t know that yet. But the mere fact that they are flexible is potentially good for all seabird species that have this trait in the long term. However, with several hundreds of thousands of seabirds dying in fishing nets and fishing hooks that commercial fisheries use at sea, how much longer do they even have? Not only do commercial fisheries pose this direct death threat through fishing gear, but they are also overfishing and depleting food stocks. We are on the verge of losing the only African Penguin species on Earth, because the availability of their food has been drastically reduced by a combination of climate change and overfishing by commercial fisheries.

In general, placing protection over seabird feeding areas is a method that has proven to be effective in some areas, but we know for a fact that illegal fishing is still occurring, and we need not underestimate its scale and impact. Arguably, the best and most rapid solution to curb the negative impact of an industry which cannot presently be well policed is to temporarily end it altogether. The quickest and easiest way to do so, would be to collectively decide to stop purchasing commercially caught fish until marine ecosystems have recovered. I understand that this would have important implications for those employed in this industry, so the discussion we need to be having now is how to manage that particular aspect of this solution. People have varying reactions to this proposed solution, and I would like to hear yours.

All-in-all, I hung out with other marine scientists for four days and enjoyed discovering just how broad the field of marine science is. Every aspect of the marine environment is being investigated by our cohort of marine scientists in southern Africa. What’s below the water, what’s on the ocean bed, the plants and animals within the water column, the water itself, the atmosphere above the water, and the impact of human activities that occur among all these dimensions are all under scrutiny. We have the brainpower to form and execute big solutions to big problems. Going forward, I want to see us propose and discuss more big solutions.

There are several things we need to do to prevent the world from collapsing. In my opinion, the first and most important step as African youths is to open our minds and start discussing solutions with a clear, common goal in mind. We need to protect the marine environment by protecting marine ecosystems and the organisms they are made of. We need to collectively recognize the significance of this matter. The marine environment absorbs up to twenty times more carbon than what is stored on land – it’s keeping us alive. It can only do so when it's healthy though.

Keep an eye out. I will start a platform for solution-focused discussions.