One of the biggest penguin colonies in the world was hiding in poop sight.
Thanks to a whole lot of guano showing up in pictures from space, researchers have discovered an unknown group of 1.5 million Adélie penguins. Their study about it appears in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) wanted to get a better handle on the population of Antarctic Adélie penguins, which were believed to have been in decline over the past 40 years. So they turned to satellite imagery, looking for the poo that is a telltale sign of penguins.
The sat pictures showed guano in an archipelago called the Danger Islands, a place never before studied as a possible penguin perch. Following that 2014 sighting, a group of scientists went down there to see how many Adélies were around. They tallied birds by hand and also modified drones to fly over and photograph the area, then fed those images into a neural net that could look for penguin nests.
The study authors write: "Our survey reveals that the Danger Islands host 751,527 pairs of Adélie penguins, more than the rest of [Antarctic Peninsula] region combined, and include the third and fourth largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world."
Coauthor Michael Polito of LSU says in the press release: "Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change."
The researchers call for the Danger Islands to be carefully studied and protected, as the area is "an important hotspot for avian abundance under projected climate change."
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
