Belinda Beresford Hundreds of Cape Town penguins owe their lives to recycled cooking oil and a schoolboy inventor. Louis Kock was 17 when he developed and patented BD1, a chemical that helps strip crude oil from feathers. The product, which is produced from vegetable oil, is being used to clean the penguins caught in the oil pollution disaster in Cape Town. BD1 reduces the adhesion of the oil to feathers, allowing it to be washed off more easily. Speed is of the essence in cleaning birds, which can die from the ordeal. Kock says BD1 works up to three times faster than products used to clean birds before, reducing the trauma and casualties. Meanwhile, dedicated international teams of bird washers are ploughing their way through the approximately 23E500 penguins rescued from the oil spill. This includes some birds that had avoided the oil, as well as about 1E000 juveniles. The bulk of the birds are being kept in a warehouse the size of two city blocks. Penguins mate for life and the hope is that when released, the rescued birds will eventually make their way back to their burrows, hopefully for a joyous reunion with their partners. Penguin mortality rates from the latest disaster in Cape Town are expected to be around 4%, very much lower than the 50% death rate among penguins affected by the 1994 Apollo Sea oil disaster. Bird experts attribute this to the speed of the rescue – the first 5E000 penguins were being cleaned just a few days after the spill occurred. Unfortunately the success of the rescue operation is putting the survival of the South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds at risk as it faces raiding its capital reserves to pay for the clean-up. The organisation survives on the income from its capital; having to use it could mean bankruptcy. It takes about an hour to clean a heavily oiled penguin, although experienced penguin washers can work up to three times as fast. The time is affected by how heavily the bird is soiled – some have to be washed up to 15 times. Catching the polluted birds is surprisingly easy. Covered in oil they won’t go into the water and so can easily be picked up as they sit on the rocks trying desperately to clean themselves. Kock’s invention won him a gold medal in the 1998 Young Scientist Expo competition, and a trip to Sweden to see the Nobel prize-giving ceremony. He is now studying medicine.