Dressing Up a Rover as a Baby Penguin

In a new study, Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France and colleagues equipped 34 king penguins with an external heart rate monitor that could be read with an RFID antenna (the same technology lets you into your office or onto the subway with the swipe of a card). A day later, they sent an unadorned 4-wheeled rover into the colony. Not only did the penguins let the rover get close enough to read their monitors, the birds’ heart rates increased less and returned to normal more quickly than when the same task was done by a human with a hand-held reader. In another experiment, the researchers disguised the rover as a penguin chick and sent it into a colony of notoriously shy emperor penguins. The birds allowed it to approach (see above) and in one case even infiltrate a creche of chicks.