The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse

by Lintott, Chris

  within padded gloves, I broke through the snow and hit melt-

  water running down the rock face. It appeared that I was falling

  down a waterfall, and the water, I took time to notice, was

  yellow—liberally infused with a year’s worth of penguin guano

  from colonies higher on the mountain.

  It was the penguins that had brought me to this remote place,

  far from an astronomer’s comfort zone. As, somehow, I managed to

  stop my sliding, I looked up to see my friend Tom Hart inexplicably

  able to stand on the same slopes that had seen me repeatedly slide

  towards the ocean. Tom describes himself as a ‘penguinologist’,

  and I was supposedly on this trip to assist him in his research.

  It’s certainly true that Tom looked at home in Antarctica, his

  uniform of tattered fleece, boots, and rucksack looking much

  more fit for an expedition to the end of the Earth than to the

  Victoria pub in Oxford. He is the architect, as well as the caretaker, of an extended network of seventy-five cameras that monitor

  136 Too Many Penguins

  Figure 20 Late summer on the Antarctic Peninsular, with the penguin nesting site now a muddy mess.

  behaviour in penguin colonies across the Antarctic Peninsula

  (the bit of the continent that sticks ‘up’ towards South America),

  plus a few scattered across the islands of the vast Southern

  Ocean. While researchers such as Tom used to visit each colony

  at best once a year, recording an annual census of the birds, the

  cameras now take an image every hour (Figure 20).

  Thanks to this network, nesting gentoo, Adélie, and chinstrap

  penguins are under scrutiny they’ve never faced before. As a

  result, the complex behaviour of the penguins as they fight for

  spots to nest, breed, and raise their chicks can be observed and

  examined. Rather than just having an annual count of each col-

  ony, changes in behaviour which might be due to climate change,

  tourism, or fishing can be recorded, and down here that’s import-

  ant. The Antarctic appeals to Tom, a committed conservationist,

  Too Many Penguins 137

  because it is protected by the Antarctic Treaty. Though politics

  interferes, this is the one place on Earth where clear evidence of

  harm to an ecosystem caused by humans should immediately

  provoke a response designed to fix the problem. Here, at least, we

  can make sure we’re not ruining the planet.

  There are two problems. The first is that while the penguin-

  ologists now have access to more data than ever before, they are no

  more numerous themselves. They face, as we astronomers do, a

  vast expanse of information encoded in images and have turned

  to citizen scientists for help. The second problem was the reason

  we were in Antarctica. There is no readily available Wi-Fi signal

  that far south, and the cost of transmitting data back to base in

  Oxford prohibitive. The images are therefore stored locally, and

  the cameras must be visited to give up their colony’s secrets.

  Each annual visit also serves as a chance to perform mainten-

  ance, to prop up tripods and supports, and to replace the batter-

  ies. Tom’s life, therefore, is a cross between that of a conventional academic and a travel agent with a penchant for the cold, though

  I have to admit there’s at least a flavour of nineteenth-century-

  style adventuring somewhere in the mix. The logistical challenge

  of getting to the cameras is made worse by their placement in

  obscure and little-visited spots. There is an existing research net-

  work in Antarctica and during my visit, members of the team

  popped in to deliver chocolate to the Argentineans, accidentally

  stumbled upon the Ecuadorian base, and visited a British Post

  Office. The scientists attached to these places and the various

  national programmes have done much to help understand

  Antarctica, but limiting the survey to penguin colonies easily

  accessed from these bases would give only a very fragmented

  picture of what’s going on.

  Instead, Tom and his team often use what they call ‘ships of

  opportunity’ to explore. They are essentially hitchhikers with a

  138 Too Many Penguins

  purpose, occasionally when needs must and funds allow resort-

  ing to hiring a yacht, but mostly travelling on board the cruise

  ships which take 20,000 or so tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula

  each year. My trip was on board the Quark Expeditions ship,

  Ocean Endeavour, a voyage on a converted Polish car ferry alongside 180 tourists from around the world who wanted to see pen-

  guins and ice. We’d left the southern Argentine port of Ushuaia,

  one of several places in Tierra del Fuego that claims to be the

  southernmost city in the world, and survived crossing the Drake

  Passage, the stormy sea that divides the continents. As I lay as

  still as possible in a rocking bunk, queasy to the core, I assumed

  we were being treated to a ship-threatening tempest, but it was

  nothing so extraordinary; the Drake Passage just is rough.

  By the morning of my icy slide, we’d already made it to ten of the

  network’s cameras. Every visit is crucial, because each year brings

  only a handful of opportunities to get to each site. Miss a camera,

  and it will fall dark for a year, its batteries drained, leaving a large gap in our knowledge of that site. So the work was important, but

  it had equally been straightforward. In each place, I’d been able to

  enjoy spectacular surroundings, in a landscape of towering moun-

  tains and looming icebergs under a beautiful late summer Sun.

  The sheer diversity of the ice is remarkable, and to me com-

  pletely unexpected. Most of it glows a deep blue colour in the

  sunshine, a colour which indicates ice under pressure. Squeezed

  hard, the air bubbles that normally scatter light and make snow

  appear white are absent. As we walked, crunching through more

  recent snow, we left a trail of blue footprints behind us. The white

  and blue of the ice is broken by dark, almost black volcanic rock

  formations, and we sailed through passages which divided sheer

  cliffs. This isn’t exactly unexplored territory, but it was surpris-

  ingly moving to look from horizon to horizon and see precisely

  no evidence of human interference.

  Too Many Penguins 139

  The aim that morning was to get to the last camera of the sea-

  son. After this, the oncoming winter would mean that Tom’s net-

  work would have to survive without him for another year. This

  one was last for good reason—it is far from the landing spots

  suitable for a cruise ship full of tourists. I’d reached my precar-

  ious position halfway up a cliff via a bouncy ride in a little inflatable boat, a Zodiac, with Tom and one of the ship’s expedition

  staff, Raefe.

  Raefe had recently retired from a career with the Australian

  military, a background which showed up in his meticulous kit,

  his complete unflappability, and his willingness to be diverted

  from his day’s routine by helping out us scientific hitchhikers. As

  I clung to the ice, I glanced down to see him sitting with a hand

  on the tiller of t
he boat, idling to keep the flakes of ice we’d

  pushed through from snarling the boat. I was very aware I was

  making a fool of myself, failing to live up to even the pretence

  that I belonged in this wilderness, as I awkwardly scrambled up

  to where Tom was.

  He eyed me sceptically, spotting the streaks of guano that now

  decorated my waterproofs, and announced we were going back

  to the boat. I’ll spare you the details, but getting back was no

  more fun than making the little progress I’d managed, but all

  ended well. We found a different landing spot, and Tom set off

  alone, happy to cope without the presence of an astronomer. I sat

  and watched him scramble up, and thought about what was

  going to happen to the data he was bringing back.

  The camera on top of the hill hadn’t been visited for over a

  year. For most of that time, images would have been taken every

  hour, adding up to thousands over the course of the year. During

  that time, nest sites would have emptied and then disappeared

  under snow, awaiting the return of the penguins in the spring.

  Once they returned, then they would have mated, prepared nests,

  140 Too Many Penguins

  guarded eggs, and raised chicks, all under the snapping gaze of

  Tom’s cameras.

  The outlines of this story are familiar to anyone who has ever

  watched a nature documentary, but it’s the details that matter. By

  flicking through the images from their cameras the penguinolo-

  gists had noticed something that would have been hard to see

  otherwise; penguins would occasionally return to their nests

  even when the colony wasn’t occupied. They seem to be keeping

  an eye on their summer homes, perhaps doing a little light main-

  tenance, but mostly ensuring the spot is still theirs. Nests are

  defended vigorously when the tightly packed colony is fully

  occupied, and it seems that at least some of the birds want to get

  a head start in securing territory.

  Those images are strangely moving, a single penguin appear-

  ing in a frame or two in the Antarctic twilight. Other newly

  revealed aspects of penguin behaviour are less romantic. There

  is a part of visiting the Antarctic that doesn’t come across in

  documentaries, and which won’t show up in the holiday snaps

  of the camera-toting tourists who sailed with us. There isn’t a

  nice way to say this, but penguins absolutely stink. The smell is

  difficult to describe, being acrid, pungently fishy, and rich and

  complex like an old brie. Try imagining a heap of manure

  sprinkled with herring left out in the summer sun and you’ll be

  close.

  One of the reasons that the birds smell so bad is their charm-

  ing habit of carelessly defecating wherever they are. It’s common

  to watch one charmingly tottering along, as photogenic as you

  like, before stopping to lift its tail and expel a bright white stream of guano with surprising speed and range. A study by researchers

  Victor Meyer-Rochow and Jozef Gal published in 2003 found the

  pressures exerted by defecating penguins are up to four times

  higher than in humans, a fact I mention mostly because they also

  Too Many Penguins 141

  note that it’s not yet known whether the birds are actively choos-

  ing which direction to direct the flow.

  In other words, it’s not clear whether they’re aiming, but results

  from the camera traps suggest there might be a reason for their

  apparently unhygienic behaviour. When the main colony returns

  in the spring, some of the nesting sites lie under snow. Until the

  snow melts, nesting cannot occur, and the main business of the

  summer can’t start. Once it does, the images from the cameras

  show a hive of activity, but they also show something else.

  The areas where the penguins are nesting are often clear of snow

  long before their surroundings. This is, Tom reckons, not the effect

  of penguins settling in suntraps, but a consequence of their liberal

  additions to the local environment. As I’d had the chance to note

  first hand, snow with penguin guano in it is darker than its sur-

  roundings, so it’s possible that it absorbs more heat from the

  Sun—like wearing dark clothes on a hot day. There are other pos-

  sibilities; it may be that the effect is more direct, and it’s the heat of the penguin poop that matters, or perhaps even its saltiness.*

  In any case, rather than random bad behaviour it may be that

  the penguins lack of toilet training is an evolutionary adaption to

  their environment. To test the idea that it’s the darkness of the

  guano that makes a difference, small plastic discs of varying

  colour had been left in front of the cameras so the team could see

  whether they too sank into the snow before the rest melted. This

  is careful experimental science in the field, enabled by the ability

  of the camera network to be there for a significant period of time

  instead of simply making a flying visit.

  Interesting things happen when you have a network of camera

  poles in the Antarctic that happen to have batteries and regular

  * This last idea is my favourite, as it means the penguins are essentially salting the icy paths around their homes, just as we do.

  142 Too Many Penguins

  visits. Tom is slowly accreting a network of other scientists who

  are interested in his sites; many of the cameras we visited were

  newly adorned with small test tubes halfway up the pole. These

  are pollen traps, collecting the slow drift of material from the air

  here in a plantless desert precisely because that guarantees an

  unbiased sample. Colleagues of mine have even talked of con-

  verting penguinology stations into detectors for cosmic rays,

  high-energy particles coming from space.

  While running about from camera to camera, and sitting

  exhausted on the ship thinking only about the next day’s efforts,

  it was easy to close my eyes and imagine myself on a great scien-

  tific voyage, exploring the last of the Earth’s great wildernesses

  (Figure 21). Yet people have been travelling to the Antarctic for all sorts of reasons for a long while now; even before I opened my

  Figure 21 A moody day in the Antarctic, with penguins, ice, and our expedition ship in the background.

  Too Many Penguins 143

  eyes and reminded myself I was on board a tourist-carrying

  cruise ship it was obvious from visiting that the Antarctic

  Peninsula is hardly untouched by human hands. While the still-

  unforgiving climate, especially the bitter winters, is always going

  to prevent large-scale immigration, on my trip alone there was

  plenty of evidence of the use to which human beings have put

  this great wilderness.

  One of the indelible memories I took from the Antarctic

  adventure is of sailing into a safe harbour known as Deception

  Island. The island is the rim of an active volcano which pokes

  above the waves, with its central caldera flooded and a run of flat

  beaches around the inner rim that provided a site, less than a cen-

  tury ago, for a whaling factory. This whole region was, in the first

  few decades of the
twentieth century, the centre of a trade in seals

  and whales that butchered now-unspeakable numbers of ani-

  mals in the Southern Ocean. As a result, the sights of Deception

  Island include not only rocky peaks and the bluest water you’ve

  seen, but also enormous rusting vats that used to contain oil pro-

  duced by boiling down gigantic carcasses. The vats stand next to

  rusting bits of dock, designed to service the whaling boats which

  used to be based here.

  The whaling trade didn’t survive long. Just a few decades after

  exploration opened up the Antarctic to fortune-seeking adven-

  turers, business collapsed under the twin pressures of the depres-

  sion of the 1930s and a fundamentally unstable business; the

  unfortunate fact is that by then so many animals had been killed

  that there were few left to profitably hunt. Antarctic exploitation

  isn’t just a problem for the past, though, and with little data available on how we were affecting our surroundings we modern

  visitors could not afford to be smug. The presence of tourists in

  Antarctica is both growing and strictly controlled, almost to an

  absurd degree. Granted access to the bridge as part of my role as

  144 Too Many Penguins

  a (very) junior penguinologist, I listened in amazement as the

  crew of the three or four cruise ships in the area negotiated pas-

  sage and landing sites. Partly they were avoiding landing too

  many people in any one place—and I should say that everyone I

  saw was scrupulous in following Antarctic Treaty rules that

  limited the number of people on shore at one time—but they

  were also keen to provide the wilderness experience sought by

  their guests. Our departure from the quiet harbour of Deception

  Island, for example, was timed so that no one on board saw the

  next ship slipping in to enjoy an unspoilt experience of an aban-

  doned Antarctic whaling station.

  If I sound cynical, I don’t mean to. Many of the most moving

  aspects of the trip for me were the traces of previous human, or

  at least scientist, occupation. On one stop I was moved to tears

  by an empty, stone-walled enclosure that didn’t even deserve the

  term ‘hut’, but which was built by scientists far from home

  searching for a magnetic pole that turned out to be on the other

  side of the continent. Tom, meanwhile, was in a spirit of not-