1.5m volunteers discover #penguins need to use the faeces in order to breed

Images looked at by 1.5 million online volunteers flagged up images to aid scientists in the discovery.

Louis Doré

Sunday 26 April 2015

A citizen science project has found that penguins use their faeces to melt rocky breeding sites in order to lay their eggs.

The project of 1.5 million online volunteers, organised by the University of Oxford, clicked through 175,000 images of penguins and flagged up images showing strange or surprising behaviour in order to aid scientific discovery.

It suggests penguins form large groups before they start to breed with the dark colour of their faeces attracting heat faster than the lighter colours of the surrounding snow, causing the area to melt faster.
The video below shows one year of the Cuverville Island Gentoo penguin colony on the Antarctic Peninsula.



Researchers hope that over the coming year, with 500,000 new images for volunteers to look at, and cameras that will take photos every minute during the breeding season, that they will learn more about the animals through Penguin Watch.

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