More than 1 million penguins who’ve been hiding in a remote part of Antarctica were recently discovered thanks to images taken from space and … their own poop.

A study in the Scientific Reports journal reveals the Danger Islands find of more than 750,000 pairs of Adélie penguins—a discovery researchers are calling a “total surprise,” per the BBC.

“It’s a classic case of finding something where no one really looked,” study co-author Tom Hart says.

The detective work started in 2014, when satellite images taken from space showed enormous guano stains (guano being bird poop), per the Wall Street Journal. Those images spurred scientists to travel to the Danger Islands in 2015, where they realized the magnitude of their find.

“I was amazed by the sheer number,” study co-author Michael Polito says, per the Independent. “The water around the island boiled with penguins.”

They counted the penguins by hand and with a drone that flew overhead snapping photos. It’s a significant number, as this colony doesn’t seem to have been as affected by population decline as other colonies on the Antarctic Peninsula. Researchers believe other colonies may have been adversely affected by a reduction in sea ice from climate change—krill, tiny crustaceans that are a staple in the penguin diet, live in the ice—an influx of fishermen, and other human disturbances.

Because the archipelago where this new colony is located is so remote, the penguins there may have been protected from some of these factors.

This group may have been around for decades, too: The scientists went back to satellite images taken in the late 1950s and, based on that evidence, they believe the penguin population there has been stable since that time. (A “catastrophic” breeding event among another Adélie colony.)

More From Newser:</s>The remote Danger Islands off the coast of Antarctica are home to a previously undiscovered supercolony of more than 1.5 million Adélie Penguins, and thanks to a satellite and some drone footage, researchers now know about them.

A new study published in the open-source journal Scientific Reports this week announced the discovery. It also details the pretty incredible way it was made.

It all started off with NASA and the USGS' Landsat satellite, tasked with beaming images of our planet from space back to waiting scientists on Earth.

Satellite photos taken in 2014 showed a significant amount of penguin poop on the Danger Islands, giving researchers a pretty good hint that a bunch of the adorable birds probably live there.

"Until recently, the Danger Islands weren’t known to be an important penguin habitat," Heather Lynch, one of the authors of the new study, said in a statement.

Scientists had thought that this type of penguin species was declining.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of [the] Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," Michael Polito, another co-author, said in the statement.

Scientists didn't know about the birds in large part because of how remote the Danger Islands are, making it difficult to try to count whatever birds might be there.

Once the research team got confirmation via Landsat that the penguins likely populate the islands, they decided to try to make the trip and count the birds by hand.

The team arrived in December 2015 and got to counting. The scientists also used a drone to photograph the area, looking for penguins.

"The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D," study author Hanumant Singh said in the statement.

After gathering those photos, the scientists were able to use an algorithm to actually look for the penguins instead of searching for them by eye, pixel by pixel.

Now that scientists know where the Adélie Penguins are, they can also work to protect them. The existence of the supercolony could bolster support for Marine Protected Areas around Antarctica.

So, everybody, let's say hi to the new supercolony of Adélie Penguins. Let's hope they stick around for a while.</s>But the new report shows a different story.

about 1.5 million more than they estimated 20 years ago

Captured in satellite images,It's not commonly thought to be a popular penguin spot, but the poop was a telltale sign that the black and white birds waddled nearby.Even so, as Jonathan Amos and Victoria Gill report for BBC News , when scientists ventured out, what they found surprised them:in these far flung nesting grounds, grouped in some of the largest known colonies of the birds in the world.A team of scientists led by ecologist Heather Lynch of Stony Brook University in New York, a craft jointly managed by the USGS and NASA. Though Landsat does not offer particularly clear images, the researchers were surprised when they saw such a large area spotted with penguin poop, Robert Lee Hotz reports for The Wall Street Journal . A year later, another team visited the location and discovered a far larger population of Adélie penguins than they had ever imaged.but also used drone imagery to scan large portions of the island.of Adélie penguins, as detailed Friday in the journal Scientific Reports Tom Hart from Oxford University, who was part of the team investigating the penguin populations, tells the BBC: "It's a classic case of finding something where no-one really looked! The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn't really try that hard."This new discovery comes in sharp contrast to the current state of other species of penguins in the Antarctic. Earlier this week, a report that the king penguin population, which can breed on just a few islands in Antarctica,suffer up to a 70 percent decline by 2100 if they don't find a new home.Until now, researchersthe Adélie penguin was suffering a similar fate as a result of climate change. As the BBC reports, Adélie penguin populations on other parts of Antarctica are in decline, especially on the western side of the continent. A 2016 report eventhat Adélie coloniesdecline by up to 60 percent by the end of the century. Scientists have linked the plunging numbers to a reduction in sea ice and warming sea temperatures, which have severely impacted krill populations, the penguin's main source of food.As Lynch tells Hotz that the Adélie penguins population has been stable on the Danger Islands since the 1950s, as evidenced by aerial photos of the region from 1957.According to Hotz,why they've been spared the struggles of other populations, Brandon Specktor writes for Live Science As Specktor reports, the international Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources is considering a proposal to recognize the Danger Islands as a marine protected area, or MPA, where human activity is limited for conservation purposes.This new study provides evidence that conservation efforts are needed, Rod Downie, head of polar programs at conservation organization World Wildlife Fund, tells The Independent 's Josh Gabbatiss."This exciting discovery shows us just how much more there still is to learn about this amazing and iconic species of the ice," Downie says. "But it also reinforces the urgency to protect the waters off the coast of Antarctica to safeguard Adélie penguins from the dual threats of overfishing and climate change."Scientists now believe more than 4.5 million breeding pairs of Adélie penguin population exist in Antarctica today,</s>In a recent study, scientists have discovered a previously unknown super-massive colony of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins in the Danger Islands, a group of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, was reported to be steadily declining. But, it seems that the scientists can now debunk the notion of penguin declination.

The study, which has been published in the journal Scientific Reports on March 2, stated that drones were used to record videos of the penguins and later the scientists hand-counted the birds.

According to the scientists, the colony seems to remain unaffected by climate change and human disturbances. Previously there were reports that said that disturbances created by mankind were majorly responsible for the reduction in the size of other penguin colonies in different parts of the Antarctic Peninsula.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," Michael Polito, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, who is also the co-author of the study said, according to EurekAlert.

Stephanie Jenouvrier, study co-author and a seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said: "The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know."

In 2014, the scientists were alerted about the penguin colony from several NASA satellite images of the Danger Islands that showed massive guano stains, also known as poop stains, on some rocks. Based on the tip-off, they started an expedition in 2015 and encountered thousands and thousands of Adélie penguins who have made the rocky islands their home.

"I was amazed by the sheer number...The water around the island boiled with penguins," Polito told fox2now.com.

Mercedes Santos, from the Instituto Antártico Argentino (who is not affiliated with this study but is one of the authors of the MPA proposal) with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international panel that decides on the placement of MPAs, said that the discovery will not only set a benchmark for future changes, but also provides important information for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) defines MPAs as marine reserves, which are fully-protected marine areas, no-take zones, marine sanctuaries, ocean sanctuaries, marine parks and locally managed marine areas.</s>If you ever find yourself hanging out on Antarctica's Danger Islands, we hope you like penguins. There's a lot of them there.

A previously unknown "mega-colony" of Adelie penguins have been found on the islands, which sit on Antarctica's northern tip.

More than 1.5 million of the birds were found in 2015 during a survey of the area, according to a report in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers estimate the Danger Islands hold the largest colonies of Adelie penguins in Antarctica and the third- and fourth-largest colonies in the world. Even more interesting, scientists think the penguins have flourished on the Danger Islands for decades, while other colonies of the birds have declined on other parts of the continent, especially on its western half.

So how were all those birds missed for all these years? Well, the Danger Islands are fairly remote, even by Antarctica standards. It's locked up in sea ice most of the year, and even in summer it's difficult to reach.

But a boatload of researchers managed to get to the islands in December 2015, and they counted the penguins by manually counting individual nests and also counting nests using panoramic photos taken by drones.

Scientists are eager to study the birds, to figure out how they've managed to survive in such large numbers all of these years, while their numbers plummeted on other parts of Antarctica. It's believed climate change, including "changes in sea ice extent and concentration as well as changes in air temperature and precipitation patterns and their possible effects on prey availability" are the primary culprits for the decline in Adelie penguins in western Antarctica.

The researchers want the Danger Islands to receive some kind of consideration for special protection because of the large number of penguins found there.</s>For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining—or so biologists have thought. A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on this species of penguin.

In a paper released on March 2nd in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1,500,000 Adélie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip.

“Until recently, the Danger Islands weren’t known to be an important penguin habitat,” says co-PI Heather Lynch, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University. These supercolonies have gone undetected for decades, she notes, partly because of the remoteness of the islands themselves, and partly the treacherous waters that surround them. Even in the austral summer, the nearby ocean is filled with thick sea ice, making it extremely difficult to access.

Yet in 2014, Lynch and colleague Mathew Schwaller from NASA discovered telltale guano stains in existing NASA satellite imagery of the islands, hinting at a mysteriously large number of penguins. To find out for sure, Lynch teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, Mike Polito at LSU and Tom Hart at Oxford University to arrange an expedition to the islands with the goal of counting the birds firsthand.

When the group arrived in December 2015, they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil, and immediately started to tally up their numbers by hand. The team also used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above.

“The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D,” says co-PI Hanumant Singh, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, who developed the drone’s imaging and navigation system. Once those massive images are available, he says, his team can use neural network software to analyze them, pixel by pixel, searching for penguin nests autonomously.

The accuracy that the drone enabled was key, says Michael Polito, coauthor from Louisiana State University and a guest investigator at WHOI. The number of penguins in the Danger Islands could provide insight not just on penguin population dynamics, but also on the effects of changing temperature and sea ice on the region’s ecology.

“Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change,” says Polito.

Being able to get an accurate count of the birds in this supercolony offers a valuable benchmark for future change, as well, notes Jenouvrier. “The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That’s something we don’t know,” she says.

It will also lend valuable evidence for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula, adds Mercedes Santos, from the Instituto Antártico Argentino (who is not affiliated with this study but is one of the authors of the MPA proposal) with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international panel that decides on the placement of MPAs. “Given that MPA proposals are based in the best available science, this publication helps to highlight the importance of this area for protection,” she says.

Also collaborating on the study: Alex Borowicz, Philip McDowall, Casey Youngflesh, Mathew Schwaller, and Rachael Herman from Stony Brook University; Thomas Sayre-McCord from WHOI and MIT; Stephen Forrest and Melissa Rider from Antarctic Resource, Inc.; Tom Hart from Oxford University; and Gemma Clucas from Southampton University. The team utilized autonomous robotics technology from Northeastern University.

Funding for this research was provided by a grant to the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution from the Dalio Ocean Initiative. Logistical support was provided by Golden Fleece Expeditions and Quark Expeditions.

Pulicaiton: Alex Borowicz, et al., “Multi-modal survey of Adélie penguin mega-colonies reveals the Danger Islands as a seabird hotspot,” Scientific Reports, volume 8, Article number: 3926 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41598-018-22313-w</s>A previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1.5 million penguins has been discovered by scientists in the Danger Islands, a chain of nine islands located off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Professors from Stony Brook University in New York say they discovered the enormous colony of Adélie Penguins, which live on the Antarctic continent, when they noticed the penguins’ feces, or guano, in NASA satellite imagery of the islands. Before the discovery, experts believed that the total population of Adélie Penguins was on the decline.

After heading to the remote island in December 2015 to investigate, the professors, along with a seabird ecologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts and other experts, said they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil.

The team proceeded to count the number of birds by hand and used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above, to help locate penguin nests that have gone undetected for decades. They counted 751,527 pairs of penguins in total.

Having an accurate idea of the number of penguins in the supercolony will help the team notice any future changes, researchers say, particularly in terms of climate change affecting the region. It will also help them understand why there are more penguins on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula than the western side.

“We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That’s something we don’t know,” said Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, in a press release.

The findings of the investigation were published in the journal , in a report which describes the Danger Islands as a “seabird hotspot.”</s>For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining–or so biologists have thought.

A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on of this species of penguin. In a paper releasedin the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1,500,000 Adélie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip.

“Until recently, the Danger Islands weren’t known to be an important penguin habitat,” said co-PI Heather Lynch, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University.

These supercolonies have gone undetected for decades, she noted, partly because of the remoteness of the islands themselves, and partly the treacherous waters that surround them. Even in the austral summer, the nearby ocean is filled with thick sea ice, making it extremely difficult to access.

Yet in 2014, Lynch and colleague Mathew Schwaller from NASA discovered telltale guano stains in existing NASA satellite imagery of the islands, hinting at a mysteriously large number of penguins. To find out for sure, Lynch teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, Mike Polito at LSU and Tom Hart at Oxford University to arrange an expedition to the islands with the goal of counting the birds firsthand.

When the group arrived in December 2015, they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil, and immediately started to tally up their numbers by hand. The team also used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above.

“The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D,” said co-PI Hanumant Singh, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, who developed the drone’s imaging and navigation system. Once those massive images are available, he says, his team can use neural network software to analyze them, pixel by pixel, searching for penguin nests autonomously.

The accuracy that the drone enabled was key, said Michael Polito, coauthor from Louisiana State University and a guest investigator at WHOI. The number of penguins in the Danger Islands could provide insight not just on penguin population dynamics, but also on the effects of changing temperature and sea ice on the region’s ecology.

“Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change,” said Polito.

Being able to get an accurate count of the birds in this supercolony offers a valuable benchmark for future change, as well, noted Jenouvrier. “The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That’s something we don’t know,” she said.

It will also lend valuable evidence for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula, added Mercedes Santos, from the Instituto Antártico Argentino (who is not affiliated with this study but is one of the authors of the MPA proposal) with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international panel that decides on the placement of MPAs.

“Given that MPA proposals are based in the best available science, this publication helps to highlight the importance of this area for protection,” she said.</s>Scientists are thrilled to discover a supermassive colony of Adélie penguins consisting of at least 1.5 million birds in the Danger Islands — a group of islands located in a secluded part of Antarctica.

What is more exciting is that scientists can now debunk the notion that penguin population was declining.

Scientists used drones to record videos of the penguins and then hand-counted the birds.

They concluded that the colony seems to be unaffected by climate change and human disturbances, which are held responsible for the reduction in the size of other penguin colonies in different parts of the Antarctic Peninsula.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," said Michael Polito, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, who is also the co-author of the study, according to a Live Science report that cited EurekAlert.

Study co-author Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), was quoted by the website as saying: "The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know."

The study has been published on March 2 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Scientists got the tip-off on the penguin colony in 2014 from NASA satellite images of the Danger Islands, which showed massive guano stains — in other words, poop stains — on some rocks. During an expedition in 2015, they encountered thousands and thousands of Adélie penguins who have made the rocky islands their home.

"I was amazed by the sheer number...The water around the island boiled with penguins," Politowas quoted by fox2now.com as saying.

This discovery not only sets a valuable benchmark for future change, but also provides important information for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula.

MPAs are marine reserves, fully-protected marine areas, no-take zones, marine sanctuaries, ocean sanctuaries, marine parks and locally managed marine areas, as defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).</s>The story of how scientists discovered a massive “supercolony” of Adélie penguins in Antarctica—which they detailed in a study published Friday (March 2)—begins in 2014, with NASA satellite imagery.

Heather Lynch, a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, in New York, and Mathew Schwaller from NASA, spotted guano stains in images of the Danger Islands, off the northern tip of the continent. Where there are penguin droppings, there are most certainly penguins, and the stains, visible from space, suggested there were a large number of them. But only a trip to the rocky, remote chain of islands could confirm the suspicion.

The duo teamed with ecologists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and other universities in the US and UK for an expedition in 2015. They found penguins nesting at the landing site, and beyond that a colony of an estimated 1.5 million Adélie penguins, a “hidden metropolis,” writes Science Alert. This meant there were more Adélie penguins in the Danger Islands than in the rest of the Antartica Peninsula combined, as the researchers report in the study, which was published in Scientific Reports. They called the area “a major hotspot of Adélie penguin abundance.”

“When we first got these pixels of guano, I thought it might be a false alarm,” Lynch told The Wall Street Journal (paywall), adding, “It wasn’t. We had massive penguin colonies that had not been known to exist.”

In fact, scientists had believed the penguin population on the continent was in severe decline, thanks to changing weather and sea ice patterns, which had led to the loss of at least eight Adélie penguin colonies.

The geography of the islands explains how these penguins, whose distinguishing features are the white rims around their eyes, have survived without detection: even in summer, the area is so “socked in with sea ice that it is very difficult to get a ship through,” Lynch also told the WSJ. Fishing boats have not endangered the penguins’ access to the krill they feed on.

To count the newly discovered penguins, the scientists used human and artificial intelligence. They reconfigured a commercial quadcopter drone to fly over the islands taking one photo per second, and those images were were analyzed by neural network software.

Judging from evidence in photographs from the 1950s, the scientists now believe the colony has existed since that era. And now that the colony’s secret is out (admittedly a human-centric point of view), the scientists would like to see the mega-colony’s habitat designated as a protected marine area.

A breakthrough discovery of this scale offers ecologists hope: Even in the age of Google Earth, maybe we don’t know our planet as well as we think we do.
Scientists discover a large colony of more than 750,000 pairs of Adélie penguins on the Danger Islands in Antarctica.