The penguin pink poop

Also visible from space

A kind of Antarctic penguin species has the particularity of taking a pink poop. Adélie penguins, which live along the coast of Antarctica and on the nearby islands, mainly eat tiny pinkish crustaceans called krill. This is why their poop is pink.

Pink poop is very useful for researchers, which given its quantity and color, can be seen by space. This helps experts to study the behavior of Adélie penguins. Researchers can’t see the penguins but only the pink stains so that they can establish how many penguins occupy that area.

NASA’s software was used to detect these pinkish areas, specifically on a group of islands called the Danger Islands. As the name suggests, they are not safe places to travel because they have a thick layer of ice that prevents researchers from surveying properly.

Apparently, there are more penguins on the Danger Islands than on the rest of Antarctica. Adélie penguins suffered climate change and their number steadily decreased over the past 40 years. According to studies, now they are about 1.5 million on these islands, not a huge number as it sounds.

Now that researchers have located them, they want to be able to protect them as well as understand why their number changed.

Source allthatsinteresting.com