Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News for Students
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Want to know what an Adélie penguin is eating? The best way to find out is to make one regurgitate its meal.
This is about as pleasant for a bird and researcher as you might think. It’s also invasive, time-consuming and costly. So scientists have been looking for other ways to determine what these birds eat. And now they have one. It relies on images taken by satellites.Landsat cameras have been taking images of the Earth from space since the 1970s. The photos don’t reveal individual penguins, let alone what they dine on underwater. What the images do show, though, is poop. Lots of it left behind by Adélie penguins throughout their breeding season.
Scientists have found that poop to be useful. The penguins cluster together at a predictable rate. That has led researchers to figure out how to count penguin colonies just from their huge poop stains. Last year, for instance, scientists reported using feces to find a supercolony of 1.5 million Adélie penguins. They were on the Danger Islands off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. That finding came from a group led by Stony Brook University ecologist Heather Lynch.
Figuring out food preferences from those images is a bit harder. But it, too, starts with poop.
An Antarctic journey
Casey Youngflesh is an 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. He and other researchers visited Adélie penguin colonies by boat. They started from either the tip of South America or the Falkland Islands. Then they crossed some of the roughest waters on the high seas by boat. “It can get a little bit hairy sometimes,” Youngflesh says, “especially on the smaller vessels.”
Timing was essential. The birds spend the dark winters following the sea ice. They return to land to raise chicks during the southern summer. Visit too early and the colonies wouldn’t…
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