What could be worse than living on a frozen tundra, you ask? Experiencing the world in only two tastes has got to be pretty rough. And when you’re noshing down on fish day in and day out, only being able to taste things that are salty or sour has got to be a bummer too. But sadly, this is the life of the penguin.
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.
It’s a story, much like the ones you’ve heard before. An orphaned bird must stand alone within its flock, to find its own place amongst its peers. But this isn’t the story of an ugly little duckling that turns into a swan, or one of a tap-dancing emperor penguin with a knack for hip hop. This is a tale of a remote-operated rover that brought researchers into the fold of a penguin colony, for a view unlike anything we’ve seen before.