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A keen eye for penguins
NEXT time you are struggling to fall asleep, try counting penguins instead of sheep. Doing so could help us see how the birds are being affected by threats like climate change.
Tom Hart at the University of Oxford and his colleagues are constantly capturing photographs of penguins through a network of about 140 remote cameras planted across Antarctica. There are far more images than the researchers can process on their own, so Hart and his team set up a project called Penguin Watch.
Through penguinwatch.org, you can join more than 1 million citizen scientists who have participated so far and help the team by flicking through photographs online and clicking wherever you spot a penguin. You will be asked to mark adult penguins, chicks and eggs in the images, by clicking on the centre of each one.
I found it surprisingly addictive. You can also keep an eye out for other seabirds that might appear and mark these for researchers to identify later. In addition to providing clues about how these animals are behaving and interacting with their changing environment, your work will also help the team to train artificial intelligence, which is increasingly allowing the group to automate picture assessing. 鈥淲e now automate about half of it,鈥� says Hart. The team still relies heavily on volunteers, though, especially to help spot unusual things, such as new species, he says.
Hart and his colleagues also regularly visit Antarctica and other penguin breeding sites in the southern hemisphere to take images with flying drones and to collect penguin faeces, which they then analyse in the laboratory to gain further insights.
Early results from the project are revealing some of the challenges that various penguin populations are facing as their environment changes. Nest flooding, for example, may reduce survival of eggs and chicks. In a recent study, Hart and his team found that .
Melting ice in Antarctica also poses a threat. 鈥淥n the Antarctic peninsula, Ad茅lies are doing very badly and now chinstrap penguins are doing very badly,鈥� says Hart. Populations of ice-loving penguins like Ad茅lies and chinstraps are likely to continue to decline, he says, whereas gentoo penguins (pictured), which tend to prefer an environment with less sea ice and more exposed rock, may fare better.
Penguin Watch and other research efforts should help to give a clearer picture of how individual colonies are responding to climate change, as well as to other pressures such as krill fishing in the Southern Ocean. 鈥淚t鈥檚 only now that we鈥檙e starting to answer these big questions,鈥� says Hart.
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