How Penguin Poop Can Lead to Conservation

Lana Gonzalez: Do you want me to say fecal samples or guano? It doesn’t matter. The poop. For one group of researchers, figuring out synonyms for “poop” is just a part of the job. Marine scientists are on a quest to understand the diets of Patagonia’s Magellanic penguins, who leave the nest to feed for weeks at a time. Scientists know where these penguins are hunting—but understanding what they’re eating has been a challenge. That’s about to change. Lana: Basically, we are able to see by the poop what their diet is. Lana: If we know what they’re eating and we know where they’re swimming, hopefully we know which fish species and which areas to try to conserve. So if the penguins’ favorite snack turns out to be anchovies, for example, the researchers can recommend restrictions on anchovy fishing to protect the penguin’s food supply. But before we get there, we have to pick up some poop. Lana: [We] put the tarps in front of the nest, the penguins come out, they poop on them, they go back in their nest, and then we come along later, scrape the fecal—or the poop up off the plastic, and put it in these little vials. The samples are shipped from Patagonia to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, where they undergo DNA analysis. Frank Oliaro: This is what we call a next-generation DNA sequencing instrument, which means basically that we can sequence lots and lots of DNA fragments all at the same time versus trying to sequence one little fragment of DNA at a time. Frank: After we have the sequences, we can then compare them to reference databases of all of these different types of organisms and see which matches—almost like a barcode, where you would match something at a grocery store. Going from unprocessed poop to usable data can take several weeks. But this cutting-edge DNA sequencing is much faster—and more accurate—than analyzing samples under a microscope. Sometimes all this data can be hard to digest. That’s why it’s compared to a control group…or should we say “control poop”? The Magellanic penguins at the Shedd Aquarium eat a controlled diet, allowing researchers to compare and contrast samples from the two groups. It also helps reveal imperfections in the poop-collecting process. Frank: Some of the other kind of odd or interesting things we found were DNA sequences from other animals that we wouldn’t have expected, things like sea lion DNA or insect DNA. So all of those probably represent contamination. It’s a lot of work to put into poop. But this research will help conservationists protect the Magellanic penguins— And that’s anything but a load of crap. Frank: Most likely depending on what they ate, you get a different variation of the color. You can see this one is bright red. I just love this one, it’s so bright red. I love it.