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I Do Armchair Penguinology for Science, and So Can You

Calling all 'Happy Feet' fans.

Of all the scientific professions you still want to be when you grow up, "penguinologist" has to be near the top of the list, even if the closest you've ever come to the flightless Antarctic birds is watching March of the Penguins or Happy Feet.

Viewing penguins on a screen from the comfort of your sofa actually sets you up in good stead to take part in a new citizen science project run out of the University of Oxford, which is recruiting "armchair penguinologists" to count the number of creatures in colonies in the Antartic.

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"Penguin Watch," hosted on the Zooniverse citizen science platform, asks volunteers to identify penguins in 200,000 photographs. The pictures have been taken by over 100 automated cameras in remote areas that are hard for researchers to reach.

An automated penguin cam. Image:  Australian Antarctic Division

I went to the platform to do my bit *for science* and was instructed to classify adult penguins, chicks, eggs, and other animals by clicking on them with different coloured marks. It's all pretty simple.

The first couple of photos I was shown were distressingly blank, or at least too dark to make out; I think they must have been taken at night, or in a cave or something. The image of a penguin on the background as the next photo loaded teased my inner penguin obsessive with the possibility that I could soon get a first glimpse of some penguins in the wild "for real."

Screenshot:  Penguin Watch

I was rewarded with a landscape positively littered with the animals, which appeared to be nesting, lying squat on the dirt. There were so many it resembled one of those impossible jigsaw puzzles where each piece contains more of the same. I started clicking away, and after pointing out 30 of the penguins—less than half that were in the scene—a popup box told me I could move on if I wished; another volunteer would count the rest.

For a penguin fan, it's pretty fun work. You never know what's going to crop up: I also got a barren rocky scene with no penguins, and then a close-up of what looks to my amateur eye like a bunch of gentoo penguins. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a colony from a distance, just specks on an icy scene. Other times, they're right up in the camera lens. Oh, hi:

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Screenshot:  Penguin Watch

But of course, there's a serious motivation behind the crowdsourced effort. The idea is to get information about behaviours, populations, and predators, and hopefully to detect any potential signs of decline—whether due to climate change or human activity—before too much damage has been done.

Your enthusiastic clicking will also help in the development of an algorithm that can detect penguins automatically.

Screenshot: Penguin Watch

"Because we have such enormous amounts of data to analyse, we want to develop a recognition tool that enables computers to automatically count every penguin individual in an image," explained the Australian Antarctic Division, which is also involved in the project, in a statement. "The work of the volunteers will help us to 'teach' computers to accurately recognise individuals, which can be very difficult within large, crowded colonies."

Your work as volunteer will therefore contribute to making your armchair skills obsolete. Now's the time to satisfy those penguinology inclinations, before the robots make even the most fun citizen science projects redundant.