flickering pictures

Antarctica is cold, barren, and an expensive place to send a research team. So what’s the best way to track penguins on the frosty bottom of the world? You rig a satellite to look for giant smears of penguin poop. Duh.

From the Guardian:

Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have used satellite images, created to survey the sea ice around Antarctica’s coast, to identify emperor penguin colonies using the huge tell-tale reddish-brown patches the birds leave behind.

BAS mapping expert, Peter Fretwell, said it was a “fortuitous” discovery. He noticed that patches on the ice in a satellite image corresponded with a known colony. The images, which came from the Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica (LIMA), compiled by Nasa, USGS, National Science Foundation (NSF) and BAS, provide a high-resolution satellite view of the Antarctic continent.

Penguins are too small for satellites to see, but the birds are notorious poopers, and penguin colonies can cover large swaths of ice with excrement. The colour of their poo varies widely too, and can tell researchers a lot about penguins’ living conditions. Acres of pink poo mean that krill — the tiny crustaceans that are penguins’ preferred food — are plentiful, and that they’re are eating well. White poo means they’re eating fish, which require more effort (and therefore more burned calories) to catch. And green poo indicates a diet of algae, a last-resort food that usually means other foods are in short supply.

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