It's no surprise than modern man is not meant to be out wandering the wild. As a top tier predator, we eat nearly everything, which places nearly every other species population on alert to our presence. And evolutionarily speaking, we're not even that self-aware. Without heightened abilities of any sort, with the exception of bipedal walking and high-functioning brain power, we can hardly find another animal in the wild, let alone comprehend what our presence does to its behavior.
But we do know that it does change its behavior. Ecological studies worldwide have shown that animals modify their behavior in the presence of other species, either predators or those outside of their typical community, and it's a common fact that the mere presence of a human researcher can skew a study's data - a fact even true in human behavioral studies. When an organism knows we're watching them, assuming they have the ability to be self-aware, they act a bit out of the ordinary.
Often it's fear or stress that are the tell-tale signs of altered behavior, and so data can often be skewed in a short-term study when the model organism catches wind of the observers trying to understand them. But it's something that many different disciplines are looking to find a way around.
Looking for a way to observe king penguin colonies in the ice fields of Antarctica, researchers led by Yvon Le Maho from the University of Strasbourg, France developed a fluffy little rover shaped in the image of a penguin chick so that they could get an up-close view of the male penguins' nesting behaviors.
"Investigating wild animals while minimizing human disturbance remains an important methodological challenge" Le Maho says. "Approaching wild animals to collect data on their phenotypic traits induces stress, escape behavior and, potentially, breeding failure and therefore jeopardizes the quality of the collected data."
And in order to remove the innate bias of increased stress from their study, the team equipped 34 king penguins in Adelie Land, Antarctica with external heart monitors so that they could make sure their rover had the least impact possible.
The first rover, made of fiberglass, was able to get near elephant seals while flying under the radar, but the male king penguins whose job it is to keep the colony's eggs safe were much more the wiser. As the rover approached, the penguins responded with alarm, squawking, pecking at the rover and elevated heart rates, which rebounded quickly to a normal resting rate after the rover entered the colony.
But in order to even further lower the stress on the colony, the researchers transformed the plain rover into something much more penguin-friendly. After developing five versions, the research team settled on a design disguised as a fuzzy penguin chick, who had the whole colony singing. Other chicks huddled together around the rover, and adults sang to it like they do for their own chicks - opening an entirely new view of penguin behavior than researchers have seen before.
