From the CBC:
Roving penguin camera gives unprecedented look at life on the ice
The newest tool for biologists is the baby penguin robotic spy.
It's pretty darn cute, and so convincing that penguins essentially talk to it, as if it is a potential mate for their chicks
Emperor penguins are notoriously shy. When researchers approach, these penguins normally back away and their heart rate goes up. That's not what the scientists need when they want to check heart rate, health and other penguin parameters.
So international scientists and filmmakers, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France, created a remote control rover disguised as a chick to snuggle up to shy penguins in Adelie Land, Antarctica — the same place where the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins was filmed.
Researchers watched from more than 200 metres away.
The final experiment is quite clever - they want to tag each penguin with a small recorder and capture their heart rate, temperature and other vitals. Because of battery life, they cannot employ a large transmitter but they can use the robot to enter the herd and interrogate each birds' recorder and the scientists will download the data when they recover the robot..
In the future, the researchers plan to use a more autonomous robot to spy on the emperor penguins. The idea is to use devices on the rover to read signals from radio tags on the birds.
Great idea.
