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Scientists use satellites and drones to discover antarctic penguin 'super-colonies'
by Staff Writers
Baton Rouge LA (SPX) Mar 06, 2018

This is an Adelie penguin and Quadcopter on Brash Island, Danger Islands, Antarctica.

A recent scientific expedition to the Danger Islands, a remote group of tiny islands along eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, used new technologies to discover and survey a breeding colony of over one and a half million penguins.

Michael Polito, assistant professor in the department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at LSU, and co-authors detail their findings in a study published in the journal, Scientific Reports, on March 2, 2018.

"In 2006, I had the chance to visit one of the Danger Islands and was amazed by the sheer number of Adelie penguins I saw. The water around the island boiled with penguins. But with only two hours on land it was impossible to estimate the size of the population before sea ice conditions forced us to leave," Polito said.

In 2014, satellite imagery analyzed by study co-author Heather Lynch, associate professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University and others indicated that large colonies might be present on all of the Danger islands.

"I thought, holy cow, there are not only colonies, but huge colonies of some sort of penguin. How did we miss this really obvious thing?" Lynch said.

This lead a team of researchers from LSU; Oxford University; Stony Brook University; Northeastern University; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI, to mount an expedition to the islands in 2015.

Using multiple simultaneous counts on the ground, quadcopter-based aerial photography and high-resolution satellite imagery they found that the Danger Islands have 751,527 pairs of Adelie penguins, more than the rest of the entire Antarctic Peninsula region combined. This discovery means these islands include the third and fourth largest Adelie penguin colonies in the world.

"The results of our study indicate that not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adelie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the populations declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," Polito said.

Obtaining this first ever count of the population of penguins on the Danger Islands offers a valuable benchmark for future change and will help researcher understand how and why climate change affects this species, noted Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI and co-author of the study.

"The population of Adelie penguins on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know," said Jenouvrier.

Because the Danger Islands have such a large population of penguins they are likely to remain an important location for this species under projected climate change. As such the team believes they deserve special consideration in the negotiation and design of Marine Protected Areas in the region.

"The size of these colonies makes them regionally important and makes the case for including them in the proposed Weddell Sea Marine Protected Area," said Tom Hart, a researcher at Oxford's Department of Zoology and co-author of the study.

Previously unknown 'supercolony' of Adelie penguins discovered in Antarctica

For the past 40 years, the total number of Adelie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining - or so biologists have thought. A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on of this species of penguin.

In a paper released on March 2nd in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown "supercolony" of more than 1,500,000 Adelie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

"Until recently, the Danger Islands weren't known to be an important penguin habitat," says co-PI Heather Lynch, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University. These supercolonies have gone undetected for decades, she notes, partly because of the remoteness of the islands themselves, and partly the treacherous waters that surround them. Even in the austral summer, the nearby ocean is filled with thick sea ice, making it extremely difficult to access.

Yet in 2014, Lynch and colleague Mathew Schwaller from NASA discovered telltale guano stains in existing NASA satellite imagery of the islands, hinting at a mysteriously large number of penguins. To find out for sure, Lynch teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, Mike Polito at LSU and Tom Hart at Oxford University to arrange an expedition to the islands with the goal of counting the birds firsthand.

When the group arrived in December 2015, they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil, and immediately started to tally up their numbers by hand. The team also used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above.

"The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D," says co-PI Hanumant Singh, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, who developed the drone's imaging and navigation system. Once those massive images are available, he says, his team can use neural network software to analyze them, pixel by pixel, searching for penguin nests autonomously.

The accuracy that the drone enabled was key, says Michael Polito, coauthor from Louisiana State University and a guest investigator at WHOI. The number of penguins in the Danger Islands could provide insight not just on penguin population dynamics, but also on the effects of changing temperature and sea ice on the region's ecology.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adelie 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," says Polito.

Being able to get an accurate count of the birds in this supercolony offers a valuable benchmark for future change, as well, notes Jenouvrier. "The population of Adelies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know," she says.

It will also lend valuable evidence for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula, adds Mercedes Santos, from the Instituto Antartico Argentino (who is not affiliated with this study but is one of the authors of the MPA proposal) with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international panel that decides on the placement of MPAs. "Given that MPA proposals are based in the best available science, this publication helps to highlight the importance of this area for protection," she says.

Research Report: Multi-modal survey of Adelie penguin mega-colonies reveals the Danger Islands as a seabird hotspot, as featured in Scientific Reports.


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