As yellow-eyed penguins disappear, conservationists focus on deaths in fishing nets

Yellow-eyed penguins on New Zealand's Otago Peninsula have declined from 739 breeding pairs in 2008-2009 to just 117 today, a drop of more than 80%, with set-net fishing, introduced predators and two chick diseases all contributing. In 2024 the last breeding-age female at Sandfly Bay, a longtime producer of chicks, drowned in a fishing net.

The IUCN listed the species as endangered in 2020, when the population was still twice its current size. New Zealand's government recently made permanent a set-net closure around the peninsula and capped fishing-related penguin deaths at four per year, a limit conservationists say is too generous given the numbers involved.

Respiratory distress syndrome, identified in 2019, has been killing 25-40% of mainland chicks since 2021, according to a wildlife manager at a local restoration group, on top of a mouth disease first found in 2002. Local nonprofits now run intensive predator control and chick monitoring just to keep mortality rates from climbing further.

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