Katta Ludynia, research manager at the foundation, said her team initially thought a predator was behind the deaths. But postmortems revealed neither a predator nor disease were to blame, but instead found bee stings in the birds' eyes.
More than 60 African penguins were found dead on Boulders Beach near Cape Town, many with bee stings around their eyes, an occurrence researchers said was unprecedented.said in a statement that it suspects a bees' nest was disturbed in the area. While penguins have been stung by bees before, the foundation said it had not seen an incident on this scale.
"And then our veterinarian actually went back to site and found dead bees on that stretch of beach," she said. "This unusual event is part of what can happen in a normal balanced ecosystem and if the penguins were not in such trouble already, it wouldn't be such a tragedy." "The main threats to African penguins are the lack of food, the competition with industrial fisheries over limited resources, increasing shipping traffic, oil spills and pollution, climate change, extreme weather events, diseases, predation and many others, not bees," Ludynia said.
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