Sleuthing through waste stains to locate penguins

Using Google Earth to track guano stains — a build up of penguin waste — Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway fifth-graders, with the help of their teacher, Lisa Rosenberg and Dr. Heather Lynch, an associate professor of ecology and evolution at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, are locating penguin colonies in Antarctica. 

The students working on the project are in Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR’s) gifted program, Thinkers of Tomorrow. The group of nearly eight students must meet certain requirements to be in the program and are challenged with enhanced thinking activities that involve problem solving, originality and flexibility. 

After reading an article about Lynch’s research and the request for citizen scientists to help, Rosenberg introduced the program to her students. “They were very successful,” she said, noting that they found about 10,000 penguins so far. When the students locate the guano stains, they send their findings to Lynch who then analyzes the information and reports back to them.  

“The penguins are going to be extinct because of global warming,” student Josh Halpert, said, explaining why it is important to find them. Warmer climates pose a major threat to penguins specifically, Lynch explained, because rain is detrimental to their survival. Rain could cause the chicks to freeze to death and eggs could die. 

Lynch said that the research is centered on three penguin subpopulations: Adélie, Gentoo and Chinstraps. These types of penguins all build nests on land, as opposed to the Emperor penguins that breed on ice. 

The students have learned that penguin stains are brown and pinkish and that their colonies are large in number.  “It’s very interesting and I enjoy doing it at home,” Alex Markovitz said.

When the penguins are in their nests and excreting guano, it builds up over time creating a stain that is visible through satellite imagery. Lynch said that although we cannot usually see individual penguins through the tracking program Mapping Application for Penguin Populations and Projected Dynamics, you can get a sense of the area a colony occupies based on the size of the guano stains and ultimately estimate how many penguins there are. Lynch and Mathew Schwaller of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed the program. 

In addition to climate change, tourism is a factor in monitoring the wellbeing of penguins. Lynch said it is important to consider the effects of visitors on Antarctica and all that inhabit the continent. “The goal is to not only to do great science and learn cool things, but to really help the policy makers make good decisions,” Lynch said, to help ensure that the wildlife is protected.

Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty system, which was originally signed by 12 countries in 1959. The U.S. signed on two years later. The treaty calls for the continent to be used for peaceful purposes, and also that scientific observations and findings be freely exchanged and made publicly available. 

“I think it’s really cool,” student Esther Gaon said.

To learn more about the mapping application or to look for penguins, visit penguinmap.com.