• Home
  • Alistair M Mcinnes
Alistair M Mcinnes

Alistair M Mcinnes
BirdLife South Africa · Seabird Conservation Programme

PhD

About

45
Publications
17,492
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
790
Citations

Publications

Publications (45)
Article
Full-text available
African penguins are among the most threatened seabird species globally and an African Penguin Biodiversity Management Plan (BMP) published in 2013 guides conservation strategies to prevent their extinction. To counter the impact of past guano exploitation which reduced the nesting habitat of these burrowing seabirds, rendering them vulnerable to p...
Article
Full-text available
The African penguin population has declined precipitously in recent decades, and if current rates of decline persist, this species could become extinct in the wild by 2035. Resource extraction of small pelagic fish prey by the purse-seine fishery around African penguin breeding colonies has been identified as a demographically meaningful threat to...
Article
Full-text available
Technological advances have enabled the observation of foraging behaviour in wild marine animals. We can observe where they go, how deep they dive, how much energy they expend, and with the use of animal-borne cameras we can capture specific foraging behaviours. Here we describe a newly observed foraging behaviour in African Penguins Spheniscus dem...
Preprint
Full-text available
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are an endangered species. Little is known regarding their underwater hunting strategies and associated predation success rates, yet this is essential for guiding conservation. Modern bio-logging technology has the potential to provide valuable insights, but manually analysing large amounts of data from animal...
Article
The rapid increase in seaborn trade since the 1990s has resulted in an increase in vessel-derived noise pollution, yet there is little evidence linking these activities to a decline in many marine taxa, such as seabirds. Algoa Bay, South Africa, is a marine biodiversity hotspot, providing habitats for the largest populations of endangered African P...
Article
Full-text available
The population of the Endangered African penguin Spheniscus demersus has decreased by > 65% in the last 20 years. A major driver of this decrease has been the reduced availability of their principal prey, sardine Sardinops sagax and anchovy Engraulis encrasicolus. To date, conservation efforts to improve prey availability have focused on spatial ma...
Book
Full-text available
The book writes on birds as challenges and opportunities for business, conservation and research. The main chapter explains how the new genetic research has and will change the taxonomy and number of bird species in the world.
Article
Full-text available
Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a “Green List of Species” (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species’ progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...
Chapter
Full-text available
The Benguela Current is used by c. 82 seabird species, of which seven are endemic to it. Eggs and guano of formerly abundant seabirds were heavily harvested in the 19th and 20th centuries but decreases in seabird populations led to cessation of these industries at islands. Guano is still scraped from platforms. Seabird ecotourism has grown. There w...
Article
Full-text available
Video data are widely collected in ecological studies, but manual annotation is a challenging and time‐consuming task, and has become a bottleneck for scientific research. Classification models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proved successful in annotating images, but few applications have extended these to video classification....
Preprint
Full-text available
Video data are widely collected in ecological studies but manual annotation is a challenging and time-consuming task, and has become a bottleneck for scientific research. Classification models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proved successful in annotating images, but few applications have extended these to video classification....
Article
Social cohesion and prey location in seabirds are largely enabled through visual and olfactory signals, but these behavioural aspects could potentially also be enhanced through acoustic transfer of information. Should this be the case, calling behaviour could be influenced by different social‐ecological stimuli. African Penguins Spheniscus demersus...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding functional relationships between seabirds and prey can play an important role in the sustainable management of fisheries that compete for the same resources yet data linking the foraging performance of seabirds directly with concurrent information on prey supplies remain limited. We assess the influence of prey availability on the for...
Article
Full-text available
Visual and olfactory signals are commonly used by seabirds to locate prey in the horizontal domain, but foraging success depends on prey depth and the seabird's ability to access it. Facilitation by diving seabirds has long been hypothesized as a mechanism to elevate deep prey to regions more accessible to volant seabirds, but this has never been d...
Article
Full-text available
In 2017, South Africa became the first African country to draft Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) legislation. The underlying legal framework supports the achievement of ecological, social and economic objectives, but a national policy to fast track the oceans economy provides a challenge for ecosystem-based approaches to MSP. During the 2018 Internati...
Article
Full-text available
Marine predators, such as seabirds, are useful indicators of marine ecosystem functioning. In particular, seabird diet may reflect variability in food-web composition due to natural or human-induced environmental change. Diet monitoring programmes, which sample diet non-invasively, are valuable aids to conservation and management decision-making. W...
Data
Example of camera-trap photographs recording the breeding stage of a subsample of nests within the colony. (Top) Photograph recorded on the 03/23/2015 at 9:27:04 showing an adult sitting on an egg. (Bottom) photograph of the same nest recorded on the same day 3.5 minutes later, showing the egg has hatched. (TIF)
Data
Time spent (in hours) photo-sampling for each week of the month. Sampling data is shown per colony and years. (PDF)
Data
Examples of prey returned to the colony by adult greater crested terns. From A to N: A) klipfish Clinid sp.; B) octopus Octopus vulgaris; C) Cape hope squid Loligo vulgaris reynaudii; D) rocksucker Chorisochismus dentex; E) spotted greeneye Chloropthalamus punctatus; F) greater pipefish Syngnathus acus; G) kingklip Genypterus capensis; H) redfinger...
Article
Full-text available
Global forage-fish landings are increasing, with potentially grave consequences for marine ecosystems. Predators of forage fish may be influenced by this harvest, but the nature of these effects is contentious. Experimental fishery manipulations offer the best solution to quantify population-level impacts, but are rare. We used Bayesian inference t...
Article
Full-text available
Seismic surveys in search for oil or gas under the seabed, produce the most intense man-made ocean noise with known impacts on invertebrates, fish and marine mammals. No evidence to date exists, however, about potential impacts on seabirds. Penguins may be expected to be particularly affected by loud underwater sounds, due to their largely aquatic...
Article
Full-text available
Marine piscivores have evolved a variety of morphological and behavioural adaptations, including group foraging, to optimize foraging efficiency when targeting shoaling fish. For penguins that are known to associate at sea and feed on these prey resources, there is nonetheless a lack of empirical evidence to support improved foraging efficiency whe...
Article
Full-text available
Small pelagic fish play a significant role in regulating the foraging activities and population trends of marine top predators in upwelling ecosystems, yet there is little information on oceanographic drivers of fish assemblages at temporal and spatial scales relevant to their predators. The survival of the Endangered African penguin Spheniscus dem...
Article
Full-text available
Studies investigating how mobile marine predators respond to their prey are limited due to the challenging nature of the environment. While marine top predators are increasingly easy to study thanks to developments in bio-logging technology, typically there is scant information on the distribution and abundance of their prey, largely due to the spe...
Article
Full-text available
This account presents the first known observations of Cape Gannet Morus capensis fledgling mortalities as a result of aggressive nest defence behaviour by African Penguins Spheniscus demersus. Observations were conducted in 2013 on Bird Island, Algoa Bay, South Africa ? the world's largest breeding colony of Cape Gannets. Twentyeight attacks were w...
Article
Full-text available
The lack of progress in establishing ambitious and legally binding global mitigation targets means that the need for locally based climate change adaptation will increase in vulnerable localities such as Africa. Within this context, “ecosystem-based adaptation” (EBA) is being promoted as a cost-effective and sustainable approach to improving adapti...
Article
Full-text available
Forty-eight monthly counts of waterbirds were conducted in Durban Bay (July 1999-June 2003). A total of 47 227 waterbirds of 79 species were recorded. Eighteen waterbird species were significantly more abundant in summer while seven were significantly more abundant in winter. Centre Bank supported 40.6% of all waterbirds, comprising mainly Palearct...
Article
Full-text available
Allan, D.G. & McInnes, A.M. 2002. A catalogue of birds' eggs in the Durban Natural Science Museum. Durban Museum Novitates 27: 3-27. A computerized data-base cataloguing the egg collection in the Durban Natural Science Museum contains details for some 1730 clutches (93% of which are still extant in the collection), covering 545 bird species (59% of...

Network

Cited By