A Gigapixel Camera Turned This Island into an Albatross 'Truman Show'
Shy albatrosses. Image: Ed Dunens/Flickr

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A Gigapixel Camera Turned This Island into an Albatross 'Truman Show'

A camera system used in baseball stadiums is helping to study Australia’s rare shy albatross and help them adapt to climate change and other threats.

Albatross Island isn't much to look at. It's just a tiny chunk of rock that sits in the waters about 22 miles north of Tasmania. Not much grows there. It's cold, it's wet, and it's extremely windy. No one lives there. Heck, no one would want to.

It is, however, a perfect place to study the rare birds for which the island got its name. A few times a year researchers load up their equipment and their Dramamine on a boat and travel 22 miles across the choppy, treacherous seas of the Bass Strait in order to monitor the endangered seabird known as the shy albatross (Thalassarche cauta).

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"They're actually not shy at all," admits Rachael Alderman, a biologist who has been running the Tasmanian government's shy albatross monitoring program since 2003. "I spend a lot of time in the colony working with them. They're really good parents. They'll defend their nests and their eggs and their chicks with their lives."

Historically, however, the adult birds haven't been as good at protecting themselves. The species nearly went extinct a century ago due to overharvesting for the feather trade. By the year 1909, only about 300 pairs were left on the island.

More recently, the birds faced another threat. Too many of them were getting caught up in fishermen's nets. "It was around the 1980s when researchers started realizing quite what was going on and what the scale was and what the impacts were," Alderman said. "The monitoring program was instigated because of concerns of fisheries bycatch."

"Lots of stuff goes occurs throughout the breeding season that we can't see"

Today, Alderman says, the population is much healthier. About 5,000 pairs of the birds—40 percent of their entire species—return to Albatross Island every year to lay their eggs and wait for them to hatch.

Scientists want to make sure that their populations remain healthy. Accomplishing that means making a perilous trek out to Albatross Island every year to see how many chicks survive and how many juveniles—who may have hatched at the island a decade ago—are returning to their birthplace to breed for the first time.

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It's not easy work. Scientists can only spend about one or two weeks at a time on the island studying the birds because it's so inhospitable and it costs so much to visit. By contrast, the birds spend up to six months there waiting for their eggs to hatch and chicks to fledge.

"Lots of stuff goes occurs throughout the breeding season that we can't see or detect or measure," said Alderman. Eggs could fail, storms could flood nests, or parents could spend too long at sea foraging for food. Understanding those factors early enough to develop conservation strategies will be critical to preserving the species in the long run.

How could they collect more data without spending more time on Albatross Island?

It turned out that baseball had the answer.

More specifically, the solution is a camera system initially designed for NASA but more recently put to use in baseball stadiums. The GigaPan camera takes hundreds of individual photos that combine into huge panoramic images of entire baseball stadium audiences. Fans can then go in and tag their individual faces from among the thousands that were photographed on game day.

Scientists thought they could do the same thing with wildlife.

First, though, they needed to customize the camera for long-term, harsh conditions. "In the Australian way, we cracked it open," said Tim Lynch, senior research scientist with CSIRO, an Australian federal research agency. Lynch and his fellow researchers modified it, built a new computer chip to control the power supply and provide greater control over when it took photos, and stuck it on Albatross Island overlooking a cliff full of bird nests.

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The first test only lasted five days, but it was enough to prove that they could track what happened on individual nests over the course of that time period.

With that proof of concept in their hands, they figured out how to fit the camera into a weatherproof casing, added a battery that would last for six months, and developed a method to mount it to the island without damaging the rocky ground. They then returned to Albatross Island, left the camera there for an entire breeding season, and collected it (and its data) the next time they visited the island.

"It worked beautifully," said Alderman. "It withstood some pretty strong winds and a lot of weather." The camera collected six months of images—two panoramic shots per day—which the researchers could then examine in the relative comfort of their offices.

Not only could they zoom into specific nests on any given day, they also used software called Time Machine, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, to create months-long movies of each nest within the broader panorama. The software allowed them to follow nests through the entire breeding season instead of just seeing it in person a few weeks a year. "You stay honed in on particular birds," said Alderman. They could play the movie backward and forward to find notable occurrences, such as when eggs hatched or why they failed.

All of this new information will be essential for preserving the species because right now the albatross population is starting to mysteriously drop again.

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"We're seeing declines in breeding success," Alderman said. "They're finding it harder and harder to produce chicks and we're seeing declines in juvenile survival."

The researchers know something is going on, but they aren't sure exactly what. "It's hard to identify what it is because they spend so many years at sea," Alderman said.

The researchers need to figure things out quickly because the albatrosses don't adapt to change very well. The birds only lay one egg every year or two and don't start breeding until they're at least five years old, often much older. "It's not like they can evolve rapidly or anything," she said.

Some of the threats—and a few possible solutions—have already been identified. For example, current climate models predict that the island will face increased downpours of rain. "If that happens at a particular time, the nests will flood, and the eggs will fail," she said. "Maybe we leave them a bit more nesting material to get their nests up a bit higher or things like that. We want to be testing these sorts of ideas while the birds are still abundant and there's time to test them."

Conditions at sea will be harder to figure out, but the camera may be able to help there, too. Parent birds share nesting duties; one incubates the egg while the other flies out to sea to forage for food. If mom is gone too long, it could be an indication that she's having difficulty finding fish nearby and had to fly further away than usual. That could be a sign of climate change or an effect of nearby fisheries, which in addition to targeting the same prey also all too often kill albatrosses which get entangled in nets and lines.

The GigaPan camera just arrived back on Albatross Island for its second full breeding season. The data it collects this year will play an important role in the conservation of the species moving forward.

"We're starting to see signs that the population is in decline," Alderman said. "We've got good reason to believe that's going to continue." Figuring out all of the pieces of the puzzle for that decline will require a lot of work, but the GigaPan is on the case.