Forget sheep: penguins need you to count them
BRITAIN: Counting penguins is harder than it sounds. They can be clustered in a huddle, waddling into the distance or even doing their best impersonation of a rock.
So now scientists are asking for help from the public to look at images from cameras across the Antarctic and conduct the biggest penguin census ever.
Keeping track of penguins has until recently been hampered by the fact that they live in the most inhospitable place on the planet.
Tom Hart, from the University of Oxford, said, however, that he and his colleagues had largely solved that with remote monitoring.
‘‘The next best thing to having a permanent base is just to leave a camera to take photos every hour,’’ he said. That had brought its own problems, though. ‘‘There are probably a million images a year: we have a data problem.’’
They are working on a computerised penguin-counting system but for now it needs help from people to validate its numbers and refine its methods.
So now the scientists need people to go through the images, sorting the bits that are penguins from the bits that are rocks, so they can understand how the colonies develop throughout the year and how they could be being affected by fisheries.
An important question is which colonies are doing well and which are doing badly. ‘‘A camera sees part of a colony. From that we can look at when they turn up, how they breed, how the chicks survive. All this is sensitive stuff we can’t get off an annual visit,’’ Hart said.
Most of the northern populations, in Africa, New Zealand and South America, have been doing badly. In Antarctica itself, however, the situation is more mixed. Some populations on the Antarctic peninsula have crashed, but elsewhere they are doing well. climate change and
Penguin Watch, the team behind the research, hopes to convince enough people to get involved to count a quarter of a million penguins during British Science Week, which starts next week.
Hart said that the data could help researchers to work out why some populations were better off than others and to help those that were suffering.
‘‘The fact that they are doing well in some areas and poorly in others gives me hope,’’ he said. ‘‘It means that we can look at what we are doing badly, and mitigate.’’
To view the images, go to penguinwatch.org. - The Times