How do Penguin poo stains expose igloos?
Ten new colonies of emperor penguins have been found in Antarctica after satellite photos showing brownish stains on the ice turned out to be the excrement of thousands of birds. The findings, revealed by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) on Tuesday, will help understand penguin populations and the vulnerability to global warming of the breeding colonies which are on sea ice. “We now reckon there are 38 colonies in Antarctica, 10 of them previously unknown,” Phil Trathan, a BAS penguin ecologist, told Reuters of the study in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. “That’s potentially a massive change in the population.” Experts studying images taken from space were initially baffled by reddish-brown splodges on the ice. “It turned out they were the feces, guano stains, of the emperors,” Trathan said. “There’s a really good contrast between the dark poo stains and the ice.” Scientists widened the search for the tell-tale blots to 90 percent of the Antarctic coastline and found 38
