Penguin poop from space
How do you track a missing group of penguins? That’s a question scientists like Michelle LaRue at the Polar Geospatial Center in Minneapolis work on, and it turns out there’s a rather interesting answer. As climate changes, ocean currents, food supplies, and ice cover around Antarctica are changing rapidly. As a consequence, every now and then, a large group of penguins finds that its current habitat can no longer support them. In 1970, for example, a large group of emperor penguins suddenly shrank in half. Where did they go? Did they die? How do you track penguins across a vast ice sheet?
The answer turns out to be, um, excrement. Penguin waste is brown, a sharply different color from the mostly-white ice sheets. When penguin populations move to a new location, satellites can detect the ice changing color.
One particular group that Dr. LaRue was tracking dealt with the loss of ice in its breeding ground by packing up and moving about 200 kilometers away, and the signature that they were in this new location was a change in ice color.
She was even able to use this technique to track possible locations where the group that vanished in 1970 might have migrated. Satellite data isn’t nearly as good from those days, but this technique will be a useful way to keep track of penguins as their habitats shift over the next few years.
-JBB
Image credit: Digital Globe http://www.livescience.com/46475-penguin-poop-satellite-tracking.html