Not to be confused with Pooh surveillance, scientists have found a way to use satellite images of poop to track penguins from space. It begs the question, what are they guano do about it?

In a new study pub­lished this week in the jour­nal Glob­al Ecol­o­gy and Bi­o­ge­og­raphy, sci­en­tists from Brit­ish Ant­arc­tic Sur­vey de­scribe how they used sat­el­lite im­ages to sur­vey the sea ice around 90 per­cent of Ant­arc­ti­ca’s coast to search for em­per­or pen­guin col­o­nies. The sur­vey iden­ti­fied a to­tal of 38. Ten of those were new. Of pre­vi­ously known col­o­nies six had moved and six were not found.

Be­cause em­per­or pen­guins breed on sea ice dur­ing the Ant­arc­tic win­ter lit­tle is known about their col­o­nies. Reddish-brown patches of gua­no, or pen­guin po­o­p, on the ice, vis­i­ble in sat­el­lite im­ages, pro­vide a re­li­a­ble in­dica­t­ion of their loca­t­ion, ac­cord­ing to in­ves­ti­ga­tors.

I remember reading how sanitation plants were sometimes sampled by authorities to get an indication of drug use by area. This seems like a much more interesting and lighthearted example of the kind of crap that surveillance can expose.