SOUTH AFRICA: Poachers are threatening one of the last big colonies of the abalone sea snail, writes Bill Corcoran in Pringles Bay, Western Cape
The Indian Ocean lapping against the Western Cape's extensive coastline is perfectly calm, which leaves marine coastal manager Peter Bernardy fearing the worst.
Although no one can be seen along the rocky Pringles Bay coastline 100km (62 miles) from Cape Town, the 55-year-old insists that divers are currently crawling along the seabed beneath large seaweed fields, poaching massive sea snails called abalone found a few hundred metres off the shore.
"The water is clear so they are out there; you can bet poachers are at work. I don't have the manpower to cover the 300 miles of coastline we have been allocated to protect and they have spotters who watch our movements, and give teams of divers the all-clear to go and take the abalone.
"It's a real game of cat and mouse, and we're losing," he says.
Since the late 1990s South Africa's abalone colonies, located all along the country's southern coastline, have been considered a delicacy amongst eastern men and women who covet it for its aphrodisiac qualities. In an effort to cash in on the animal's alleged powers of sexual prowess, Chinese Triad gangs and local criminals have established extensive multi-million euro poaching rackets that are threatening the abalone's very existence.
One of the world's last big concentrations of abalone has consequently become a battleground between conservationists determined to protect the species and the divers and smugglers who earn thousands of euros a night poaching it.
To highlight the scale of the problem, Bernardy reveals that from April to June this year his 50 Operation Orca conservation agents made 115 arrests, confiscated nearly 30,000 poached abalone that would have sold for nearly €300,000 on the black market.
"There is so much money to be made that people from all around South Africa are coming here to poach: it's like another gold rush and the majority are getting away with it," he says.
The poachers are better equipped than the under-funded conservation service and have an advantage when it comes to the law: unless caught in possession of the animal they cannot be prosecuted for poaching. This has led to a highly developed approach to poaching that leaves the conservationists only a small window of opportunity in which to catch the culprits.
"The submerged divers have mobile phones wrapped in plastic inside their wetsuits while they poach. When a lookout sees a member of the coastal marines approach he just rings and the divers stay down until the coast is clear or else leaves the poached abalone in a bag underwater and comes back later to collect it.
"When he finally takes it out he gives the abalone to a runner who takes the shells off and carries the merchandise to a courier who transports it to a house nearby for drying. They then move the stuff by the tonne to Cape Town or Johannesburg where it is shipped to the east.
"Most of the time we are trying to stop the divers getting into the water in the first place or trying to get the big shipments leaving the area, but this is when it gets dangerous. I was shot at a few weeks ago as we chased a car suspected of containing abalone," he says.
The scale of the problem led to South Africa opening its first dedicated environmental court in a mobile home in Hermanus, a tourist town near Pringles Bay, in 2003. Since then the marine and coastal management team, has recorded a 75 per cent conviction rate, but most first-time poachers only get a suspended sentence.
In an effort to slow the poaching the government has set up an allocation system, which gives local fishermen ten-year rights to harvest a limited number of abalone from a certain area. The idea is that because permit holders have an interest in protecting the supply, they will inform on the poachers.
"What we really need is more funding. If we were able to acquire the technology and equipment - the marine coastal guards only have four cars to patrol the 300 miles of coastline - we would be abe to stop the majority of the poaching.
"We do get donations from some businesses and we buy equipment with that, but we need more investment if we are going stop the eradication of the species from South Africa's coast.
"At the moment the poachers are far better equipped than we are," he concludes.