The Physicist Who Tracks Penguins From Space

Physicists have long conducted research with space-based instruments. But at Stony Brook University, one physicist uses satellites to study something unusual: penguin poop.

Heather J. Lynch, a quantitative ecologist at Stony Brook’s Institute for Advanced Computational Sciences, has developed computer vision tools that enable satellites to map penguin guano, which is pink in color. The guano can reveal the size, health, and movements of Antarctic penguins — and how stressors like climate change, tourism, and overfishing affect their populations. “The colony that is declining in abundance is a very different spatial patterning than a colony that's growing in abundance,” Lynch says. Her team also used the method to discover one of the largest penguin colonies on the continent, in a region called the Danger Islands.

“My physics background has been really influential,” she says. Viewed from space, the penguin colonies take on strange shapes, like “spots on the ground, or stripes, or complex labyrinthine patterns.” With years of condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics under her belt, she says, “I ended up on this really long journey to understand the physics of penguin colonies.”

Ten years into the project, Lynch is still figuring out how the groups move. “They actually form a liquid order in the colony, [and] you can treat them as little atoms,” she says, with “spontaneous symmetry breaking…driving a lot of this pattern formation.”

Lynch became enamored with physics while at Princeton University. She focused her undergraduate thesis on quantum dots, which earned her the APS Apker Award, and then started her doctoral degree in physics at Harvard. “I liked what I was doing in physics,” she says. “It remained very challenging and exciting.”

But when Al Gore visited campus and delivered his famous presentation on global warming, Lynch was captivated. “This seemed like a problem that I should be working on,” she remembers thinking. After earning her master’s degree in physics, she transferred to the biology department for her doctorate.

Today, in her new role as Director of Stony Brook’s Collaborative for the Earth initiative, Lynch unites experts whose work relates to climate change, whether via chemistry, the humanities, or physics. “I’m really trying to break down the traditional disciplinary barriers that keep these people from talking to one another, to make sure that we are in a position to tackle the really big environmental challenges,” she says, referring to herself as a “chief cat herder.”

“That's been nice to exercise those muscles [and] have at least a toe in all of these different disciplines,” she says.

Many of Lynch’s research findings are referenced by lawmakers, and for 20 years, she has supported Antarctic treaty negotiations, providing information to world governments and building tools for policymakers to use when they designate protection zones. As a result of Lynch’s penguin investigations, the proposed marine protected area for the Western Antarctic Peninsula, currently under consideration, was expanded by about two million hectares to include the Danger Islands.

“It's the best example I can think of where you have a technological discovery, which is that we can find penguins from space, [and] we confirm it on the ground, and then it feeds directly into improved management,” she says. “This area which was thought to be a penguin desert is now a penguin hotspot, and it's under protection now.”

Because of the robustness and reliability of the satellite monitoring techniques, ecologists are now using them to track other species, including walruses, elephants, and even cows. She is also contributing to a project that will map mammals near Chernobyl, where radiation levels prevent investigators from taking data on the ground.

Lynch is celebrating, too. This fall, the American Association for the Advancement of Science honored her team with the Golden Goose award, which spotlights scientific studies “that may have seemed obscure, sounded ‘funny,’ or for which the results were totally unforeseen at the outset,” but have benefited humanity.

Lynch believes physics has been key to her success. “I couldn't do what I do now without that background, so my advice is to be confident that the background you’ve received in physics is going to take you far and wide,” says Lynch.

After all, “who's going to save us from climate change?” she adds. “It's going to be the physicists.”