NASA Looks to Penguin Poop for Answers on Antarctica's Ecosystem

Think of it as a tea leaf reading, only stinkier.

Researchers are using NASA Landsat satellite images to see how environmental changes are affecting the world’s animals, specifically the Adadélie penguins of Antarctica.

According to a blog post from NASA, these penguins are “a species that can provide an early warning of threats to Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem.” So when scientists noticed a decline in some Adadélie populations, they worried climate change and other factors may be affecting the penguins’ diet and access to food — which could speak to a larger issue.

To get answers, a NASA-funded team recently scoured years of Landsat images of the remote Antarctic islands these birds call home. Often used to determine the number of breeding Adadélie penguin pairs, these images rely on penguin poop to tell the story.

“Male and female penguins take turns incubating the nest. The guano left behind builds up in the same areas occupied by the nests themselves,” Stony Brook University associate professor Heather Lynch, a member of the research team, said in NASA’s post. “We can use the area of the colony, as defined by the guano stain, to work back to the number of pairs that must have been inside the colony.”

To get an idea of how environmental factors affected the Adadélie penguins’ availability to food sources, the team looked not at the amount of guano, but the color of it.

“Penguin guano ranges from white to pink to dark red,” Lynch added. “White guano is from eating mostly fish; pink and red would be from eating mostly krill.”

After peeking at the poop colors from years of Landsat satellite imagery, the team found “that while Adadélie penguin diet did show changes from year to year, no consistent pattern was apparent.”

“It is interesting that no obvious trend in diet was seen over time, despite changes in the physical environment,” Casey Youngflesh, a graduate student from Stony Brook University and research team member, said. “This was a big surprise, since the abundance and distribution of Adélie penguins has changed dramatically over the last 40 years and scientists had hypothesized that a shift in diet may have played a role.”

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There may be no clear answers now, but the team emphasized the importance of this kind of imagery. Years of data will allow conservationists to monitor and manage this “pristine” ecosystem in the face of continued environmental changes.

Plus, it is “incredible that we are now able to determine what penguins are eating from space,” Youngflesh said.