Undercover Robot Baby Penguins Are the Future of Ecology

In what may well be the cutest scientific study ever conducted, ecologists dressed a rover up as a baby penguin in order to infiltrate the notoriously shy bird's ranks.

The study, published Sunday in Nature Methods, argues that undercover robots are able to monitor and extract information about animals without causing them stress—which both is a bummer for the animals, and affects the validity of the science itself.

"Investigating wild animals while minimizing human disturbance remains an important methodological challenge," the authors, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg, wrote in the paper. "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."

Answer: undercover robot penguin baby. The team experimented with about five different prototypes before they developed a model that the penguins generally accepted.

According to the study, when the final version of the rover approached a group of 158 emperor penguins, 28 percent of them were put off by it, 47 percent were undisturbed, and 25 percent were actively curious. In fact, the faux penguin was able to waltz right into a crèche—a penguin nursery—and many of the birds tried to communicate with it by singing songs.

"They were very disappointed when there was no answer," Le Maho told the Associated Press. "Next time we will have a rover playing songs."

Songs aren't not the only upgrade Le Maho and his colleagues will be giving the Penguin Rover 2.0. "Concerning emperor penguins, we are developing a project based on a robotic fake adult penguin," Le Maho told me over email. He said the existing chick rover will be used in ongoing observations of king penguins.

Both the adult and baby replicants roving around the colony are expected to produce a wealth of observations, with a much reduced impact on the quality of life of the birds. "Our next project is to use rovers to understand how penguins are located into their colony according to their own individual history," Le Maho told me. That will include "the role of vocalizations in this structuring."

Le Maho's study is the latest of a number of experiments involving camouflaged reconnaissance robots. Earlier this year, for example, I reported on a Carnegie Mellon University study that sent cameras disguised as crocodiles into Kenya's Mara River to study hippopotamus dung. In addition to extravagantly spraying their poop around with their tails, hippos apparently were dropping so many deuces that they were causing mass die-offs of fish downstream.

In this case, the crocodilian spies were designed to protect the researchers from contact with the hippos as much as the other way around. Unfortunately for hippo experts, these animals have no qualms about tipping over boats and swallowing their passengers. Case in point: one of the hippos chased after the robot but, luckily for the research team, abandoned the attack.

The CMU hippo attack. Credit: YouTube/CMU

The BBC also captured some amazing shots of dolphins by dressing two "podcams" up as a tuna fish and a sea turtle, for underwater and surface shots respectively. The camouflaged cameras captured some utterly unique dolphin hobbies, like getting high off of pufferfish.

BBC's Secret Life of Dolphins. Credit: YouTube/BBC

Researchers at Harvard have even created soft robots that mimic the color displays of cuttlefish, so the "undercover robot spy" methodology appears to be catching on across many species. It's a natural extension of recent experiments that have attached cameras to the subject animals themselves, but as Le Maho's team discovered, it is far less invasive and thus yields more reliable results—with the added benefit of the animal's comfort.

But as promising as this fledgling method of approaching ecological research is, I'm guessing it will be some time before it yields anything half as cute as the penguin rover. If you don't believe me, take in this expanded view of the cover picture. Scientists of the world: that is going to be hard to top.