You may think penguins all look the same, but you’d be wrong. A remote-controlled video camera on a South African island can identify individual birds from the arrangement of distinctive black plumage spots on their chests.
The camera – part of a system built by Tilo Burghardt and Peter Barham of the University of Bristol, UK – is hidden at ground level on a path the penguins use daily to reach the sea. If a bird’s chest is clearly visible, image analysis software generates a 2D map of the plumage spots. This can be compared with a database of stored…
