Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News
The best way to find out what an Adélie penguin is eating is to catch it and make it regurgitate its meal.
This is about as pleasant for bird and researcher as you might think. It’s also invasive, time-consuming and expensive to do on a large scale, so scientists need other ways to determine diet. Now they have one; it relies on images taken by Landsat satellites.The satellites don’t reveal individual penguins, let alone what they are consuming underwater. What those images do show, though, is poop. Lots of it. Because Adélie penguins cluster together at a predictable rate, researchers have figured out how to count penguin colonies just from their huge poop stains. Last year, for instance, a group led by Stony Brook University ecologist Heather Lynch reported finding a supercolony of 1.5 million Adélie penguins on the Danger Islands, off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, from their feces.
Figuring out dietary preferences from those images is a bit more complicated — but it also starts with poop.
Casey Youngflesh is a quantitative ecologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Until a few months ago, he was a graduate student in Lynch’s lab. During that time, he made several trips to the Antarctic Peninsula, visiting Adélie penguin colonies by boat from either the tip of South America or the Falkland Islands.
That required crossing some of the roughest waters on the high seas, and, he says, “it can get a little bit hairy sometimes, especially on the smaller vessels.”Timing was essential. Visit too early and the colonies wouldn’t have started to nest. (The birds spend the dark winters following the sea ice before returning to land to raise chicks during the southern summer.) Visit too late and the colonies would be a mess, with large…
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