A Port Alfred resident enjoying a walk on the beach on Monday afternoon was shocked and distraught at the sight of “thousands upon thousands” of freshly stripped perlemoen shells scattered across the rocks between Flame Lily and Kelly’s Beach.
The beachgoer, whom we’re not naming for their safety, told Talk of the Town, “They’re fresh: it looks like it was done on Saturday night or Sunday night. And it’s the third time it’s happened in this section of beach in the past two or three months! Why aren’t the authorities doing something?”
Talk of the Town requested comment on the discovery from the South African Police Service. SAPS spokesperson Captain Marius McCarthy said, “Police bear no knowledge of such an incident.”
He said the report about abalone poaching at Shelley Beach had been noted with concern and would be considered during ongoing crime prevention operations.
Clinton Millard is the owner of private security company Multi Security which operates along the Sunshine Coast, from Alexandria to Kleinemonde. Millard said, “We have seen an increase in signs of abalone poaching over the past few months on the Sunshine Coast, including in the Port Alfred area.
“This is a concern and especially because this is a very difficult crime to combat. If members of the public have any information about such incidents in our area, they should contact their local police station. They may also call the Multi Security offices, and we will direct the information to the police.”
The extent of South Africa’s coastline is one of the factors that makes policing abalone poaching so challenging.
“Abalone occupies shallow inshore waters from Cape Columbine on the country’s west coast as far east as Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape,” says Independent illegal wildlife trade investigator Daniel Stiles in a May 2024 article titled ‘Ocean Escargot: South African Abalone’ on the medium.com website
In 2014, the South African government project intended to empower community-based fishing operations, Operation Phakisa, began to establish several community-run abalone catch zones.
“Illegal divers have located abalone concentrations, mainly along the coast around Port Elizabeth, and since 1997 the Eastern Cape has become a major source of supply for the illicit abalone industry. The poachers threaten the community-run abalone catch zones,” Stiles writes.
Citing global biodiversity and sustainable development NGO, TRAFFIC, Stiles notes that around 117 million abalone worth around R18.6 billion were poached between 2000 and 2020. Since then, nearly 3,000 tonnes of illicit abalone had been smuggled out of South Africa every year, Stiles says.
“The high demand and exceptional prices in eastern Asia over many years have outstripped the ability of the fisheries industry to sustainably harvest abalone. Attempts to implement quotas and restrict off-take in areas of endemic poverty have resulted in organized gangs taking over control of a lucrative production opportunity, with the gang bosses, working in league with corrupt government officials, supplying Chinese criminal networks who illegally export the abalone to the Far East in large quantities,” Stiles says.
A 2009 research paper by Rhodes University academics Serge Raemaekers and Peter Britz profiled abalone poachers. At the time of their research, typical perlemoen poachers from urban centres of the Eastern Cape were predominantly white males aged between 16 and 55.
“Adolescents assisted as helpers or ‘lookouts’, with the potential of becoming divers,”
Ndlambe Local Municipality’s coastline had become a hotspot of illegal fishing activity in 2006, as illegal abalone fishers began targeting new areas outside of Port Elizabeth, the researchers said.
How they do it
Describing how the operations were typically conducted, the researchers said, “Upon arrival at the designated dive location, reconnaissance divers using snorkelling gear would be deployed to assess the reefs for abalone. Only then would divers equipped with self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA; with 15–18l cylinders) be deployed.
“Divers were equipped with waist bags for the abalone and torches, if diving at night. Abalone were lifted from the rocky substrate using a flat-bladed tool, de-shelled (shucked), and eviscerated in the water. After diving, boats were washed down with fuel, and gloves discarded, to remove any abalone tis-sue and mucous which might provide deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence of illegal abalone possession.
“The returning boats carrying the divers then acted as a diversion from the boat with the abalone bags for possible patrol boats. Abalone would be dropped off anywhere along the coast or in estuaries. Using information provided by ‘lookouts’, ‘runners’ would swim the bags ashore and carry them to the waiting vehicles, which transported the abalone to catch accumulation points or drying facilities.”
Shore based illegal harvesting was often done under the guise of a family outing, the researchers said.
“Shore-based divers would most often spend the entire day at their familiar dive spots, and dive only when enforcement activity was low. Divers would hide bags in between rocky ledges above or under the surface. From these points, ‘runners’ transferred them through the dune vegetation to standby vehicles.”
Read the full research paper here: https://bit.ly/TOTTPerlyPoachResearch
- This article was first published in Talk of the Town, July 4, 2024. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.