The Penguin Watchers Our World

The only continent on earth with no native human population.

But Antarctica's coasts are teeming with life.

So how can scientists study and protect that wildlife

year-round through the harshest winter on the planet?

I'm Victoria Gill and I'm following a team of scientists who

are setting up remote cameras in penguin colonies here.

Here in the Antarctic Peninsula, penguins are largely declining.

Why?

That's OK, bud.

I want to understand what the threats are to penguins

in this region and how to get rid of those threats.

Climate change is already having an impact on penguin populations here.

So what can Antarctica's most famous residents reveal about the future of

our planet's greatest wilderness?

We are on the shortest possible crossing to Antarctica

from the southern tip of Argentina.

It's actually quite hard to breathe when you put your face in the wind.

It takes more than two days to cross the infamously rough Southern Ocean.

We're about half a day's sail away from the Antarctic

peninsular, and I guess this is the weather they talk about when you've

got to cross the Drake Passage.

The winds are uninterrupted by any landmass.

And yes, pretty brisk.

We've got our first iceberg just over my

shoulder, which is very exciting.

It might look uninviting but this is a highly productive ocean.

It's the foundation of the Antarctic food chain.

Seabirds, including glider like albatrosses,

follow the ship throughout our 1000-kilometre voyage.

But these displays are only a glimpse of why scientists make

this journey and of what's to come.

Antarctica is this vast thermostat for planet Earth, so we need to

understand what's happening here, not just to protect its wildlife but

to predict what's going to happen to our own climate in the future in

places that are much more populated than this. There's a glimpse of

Antarctica, even more spectacular than I could have thought.

Gorgeous day, perfect day for camera setups.

Perfect day for penguins.

On the deck of our ship, the Ocean Endeavour, I meet

Antarctic biologist Tom Hart.

He's been working here for ten years and spent

the last five setting up a network of penguin monitoring cameras.

This is the first of just five days he'll have to work

in the peninsular.

So as soon as he spies the mainland he's making a plan.

The harbour is at the eastern end of the bay.

But a day like this here is rare.

The sun's out and it's a balmy zero centigrade.

Landing ashore, though, can be risky.

Weather conditions can suddenly change and we have to be prepared.

OK, a quick safety check, has everyone got water?

Tom and his team will go ashore more than a dozen times during this trip,

but every landing is taken very seriously.

OK, let's go.

And it's not just about personal safety, we have to

protect the environment here too.

This is the gangway on the side of the ship where we get onto

a smaller boat.

Before we go ashore, we have to wash our boots.

We can't take anything onto the Antarctic mainland

which wouldn't be there.

It's just a short ride from the ship to reach the shore.

But with relatively sparse sea ice, access to this bay and its nesting

residents is smooth sailing.

Here in their hundreds, these are gentoo penguins.

This is one of the cameras.

Right.

As you can see there are a bunch of nests in view.

This is the cool one, it takes a photo every hour all year

which shows when they arrive, when they depart,

the reproductive success, which chicks survive and which don't.

But this has to survive an entire Antarctic winter.

It actually looks surprisingly simple to me.

It's simple, very cheap, a basket of rocks that holds up

the pole and that works.

It's light so we can carry it up here, we can buy these locally

or ship them round the world.

These penguins provide scientists with a barometer of Antarctic

environmental change.

The birds will return to this exposed rocky spot every year.

Gentoo nests painstakingly built from valuable bite-size stones that

they seek out are vital to protect eggs and chicks

from the ice-cold ground.

As few as a quarter of these birds will survive their first year,

but those that do will return to this site as adults to breed.

What Tom's camera's capturing here, and what he's come all this way to

retrieve, is a rare glimpse of a whole year in

that struggle against the elements.

What we're going to do today is check this camera, change

the batteries and the SD card, then that's good for another year.

There are a number of threats to penguins.

We understand some of them and we don't understand others.

This is the equivalent of having 70-100 biologists all around

Antarctica and simultaneously recording and comparing notes, and

they do that 365 days of the year without complaining how cold it is.

With the first camera reloaded its back to the ship to prepare for the

With the first camera reloaded it's back to the ship to prepare

for the first landing in just two hours.

The Ocean Endeavour is the base for the scientists, but this isn't

a research expedition, this is a tourist cruise.

The researchers work in partnership with an American tour

company, so they are amongst almost 200 holidaymakers on this trip,

but nearly 4,000 tourists will have visited Antarctica this season,

but nearly 40,000 tourists will have visited Antarctica this season,

hoping for close-up encounters like this.

A century ago a place that explorers risked their lives just to set foot,

Antarctica is now an adventure traveller's dream destination.

The team has now installed 40 cameras throughout the peninsular.

Try and get it nice and tight.

Some like the one here on Booth Island are more difficult to

reach than others.

Touring from place to place like this means they can visit up

to three of these sites everyday.

They'll have their first glimpse of what the cameras captured

when they are back aboard.

For now the aim is to reach as many of their monitored colonies

as possible.

To make the most of every excursion once they've

retrieved images from the camera, Tom and his colleague, Ph.D.

student, set about gathering a very different type

of information from the penguins.

Hey, buddy.

So today I'm collecting a bit of guano sample,

essentially penguin poo.

I'm also getting a couple of swabs on some adults and chicks,

and we're looking to see if the viruses and the microbes are

shared from adult to chick since the adults recurred to take

their food and feed their chicks.

It's actually a fairly common procedure.

I'm not sure it's ever been done on camera.

Sometimes it involves a little bit more defensive posturing on my part.

It's OK, bud.

But it's generally OK and pretty quick.

It's OK. It's OK.

For Antarctic biology, this is a very special site.

All three species of penguin that inhabit the

peninsular, gentoos, chinstraps and adelie penguins nest here together.

For disease monitoring it's really cool to be able to be in

a place where we can see if diseases or bacteria and viruses are shared

across the three species whether they are live together or not.

This is a new vein of conservation research.

Very little is known about the impact of disease here.

But along with climate change, that scientists have already linked

to declines in chinstrap and adelie penguins, it is a suspected threat.

This is an area where policies tend to be

implemented that might be damaging and then only when the research

shows that things are damaging are they reversed, I think it should be

more pre-emptive and proactive.

Getting that data with the cameras and now getting the baseline disease

data is an important way to set things up properly for the future.

This project provides scientists with Antarctic CCTV,

a window into how exactly this environment is changing,

and what might be done to help.

Having spent the day ashore captivated by the wildlife,

I can't wait to see what the remote cameras have been gathering when

there's no-one here to witness it.

Hello.

At the end of each day the ship will move on,

and it's during these journeys that Tom finally has a chance to see

what his cameras have captured.

These are some of the cards you have got from this trip?

This is everything from this morning and yesterday.

Has everything worked?

Do you have...

Looks like it.

Great, that must be a relief.

Yeah, massive relief.

That's really good.

So that is a year in the life of that penguin colony.

Yes.

That's amazing.

The cameras captured a glimpse of every hour

of an entire Antarctic year.

This network means researchers can see how penguin colonies are

affected by weather, and by human activities like tourism and fishing.

So you're just going to scroll through all these images?

Absolutely.

This is the early stage of a long-term monitoring project, and it

has been revealing some unexpected information, including how penguins

seem to use all that messy guano to clear the ice, leaving

the rocks ready for nesting.

The times when you are not here, seeing what is going on

in winter is really beautiful, and it is just something that you

wouldn't get to see.

So nobody gets to see these cycles in the way that we get to see them.

Another day, another icy journey to the next site.

We sail through the famously stunning Lemaire Channel.

Tourists gather on deck to take in the scenery and the wildlife,

including this large pod of orcas.

As we approach the end of this narrow passage,

our path is blocked by the ice, but that brings us even closer to

some of Antarctica's inhabitants.

The icy platform these animals rely on looks substantial, but it

is relatively thin and brittle.

A careful nudge satisfies the crew that we can safely push through,

and we are back on our way.

Over the course of the next few days,

we visit ten different colonies.

The team is also counting the birds, working closely with the US

organisation.

Since 1994, they have been tracking migrations on this peninsula.

But as their network grows, they are amassing millions

of images, too much data for them to study on their own.

The solution - enlisting the public's help.

All of the images will go online, in a vast Antarctic citizens'

science project.

The team wants as many eyes as possible helping them to monitor

the birds' survival.

For the first time, people really can take part in Antarctic research

from anywhere in the world.

And we really need them, because we have millions of images.

We can't do this without them.

This will make a difference to how we manage Antarctica.

Science is the one human activity that is truly prioritised

and promoted in Antarctica.

In a land with no borders, where there has never been a war,

a land that belongs to no state, 30 countries operate research bases.

Each one is a microcosm of national culture.

And with Antarctic summer tourism growing, many of them,

like the Ukrainian Vernadsky Research Base, welcome visitors

into their little world.

It is the world's most remote gift shop.

Apparently if you leave your bra you can get a free shot of booze.

I'm not going to do that.

It is the relatively busy summer research season, and the scientists,

all male, live and work on-base.

The people running the gift shop and serving drinks at

the bar are also botanists, marine biologists, and climate scientists.

It is an isolated existence here, and just 12 men will make this

place their home throughout the long Antarctic winter.

How is it to live here for 14 months?

That's a long time.

It is a long expedition.

Yeah.

And during this expedition I made 100 dives.

You dive there?

Yes.

So you do marine research.

I am a scuba diver.

I made this myself.

That is lovely.

We have, in winter, a lot of.

This used to be a British research base.

It was sold to Ukraine in 1996, and with it an instrument that was

key in a major Antarctic discovery.

This is the station where the ozone hole was discovered in 1985.

A lot of ultraviolet comes here.

Outside, only 20 minutes, you have red skin.

It seems typical of an Antarctic research base to find

an instrument that gathered information that changed the world

in someone's bedroom.

This is Nobel Prize-winning research that went on here.

That is about as rock 'n' roll as it gets in science.

That's...

That's amazing to see.

For the tourists we are travelling with, this is a curious glimpse

of the people who work here.

But for these visitors, who are from all over the world

and of a surprisingly wide age range, Antarctica's allure is

its landscape.

How old are you?

Nine.

Nine, and is this your first time in Antarctica?

Yes.

What do you think of it?

It's awesome.

I look at it as looking at God.

This is God's hand, this is God's handiwork.

I mean, it is stunning.

You can tell stories, you can show your mates, "I have these photos,"

but until you are actually here, it doesn't do it justice.

We are here to provide people a way to see this, and experience

it, and build a relationship to it, and have a reason for it to be

relevant to their lives.

We are really attentive to impacts.

So we have, you know, a series of guidelines that we follow,

and the International Association for Antarctic Tour Operators is

a really good example of industry advancing on regulation.

You know, we have collectively decided we want

to be really as light-handed as we can, and these are the things

we are going to do to do that.

There is a certain paradox in the very fact of bringing large groups

of people to a pristine environment.

But by being on this cruise, these tourists are subsidising

Antarctic science.

We have quite a close partnership.

We would never have the access without them.

They drop us off where we want to go, and

in return we educate their tourists about conservation, and hopefully

inspire them to conserve penguins.

But even with scientists on board, should tourist ships visit

Antarctica at all?

What does it make you feel to see a troop of tourists in yellow

parkas walking along the shore?

It gets odd, it is really odd.

But the data suggest that tourism is not having an impact.

There are far bigger threats, and these are threats that are

actually going unchecked.

Because of tourism there has been clean-ups of scientific bases,

and that is ongoing.

It is actually only going to improve with the internet, and with

people reporting the bad stuff.

That's what actually forces governments to clean their act up.

This is high-end ecotourism.

Tom's lectures are full.

The passengers want to learn more about

the environment they are visiting.

But some of the travellers aboard have spent up to $15,000 to come

here, so they want to have some fun.

On the ship, one of the things you can do is an

activity called polar plunge, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

A dip in the sea.

These people in front of me are queueing to jump

into the sea in Antarctica.

The lack of judgement on display in this room is pretty phenomenal.

I'm terrified.

This has actual sea ice.

Swimming in near-freezing water is a one-off experience, in what for most

will be a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

How is it? How is it?

Holy BLEEP!

How is it, without swearing?

It's cold.

With the water just a fraction of a degree above freezing,

you can't swim for long.

I managed to last just over 30 seconds.

It's so cold!

With experiences like this, and the brutal beauty of this place,

you can see what brings the growing number of visitors.

But what drives people like Tom to spend months every year working

here, and to keep coming back?

I'm really trying to make a difference, but there's no doubt

that this is personally just very very rewarding.

Sites like this, even when you are focused on the science,

and you forget every now and then to look up, after a few hours you

look up, and it's phenomenal.

So, yeah, there's really - yeah, kind of feeds your soul.

So there is - this is the last camera for this expedition now.

For this one.

And so I think that is...

That's it for this year, for this camera, anyway.

And now it's just to turn it on, and fingers crossed.

So does that mean we can go back to the ship now for a cup of tea?

Yes, let's go.

Excellent.

The penguins are unbelievably cute, but beyond that,

they are such an important part of the ecosystem here.

Watching over that ecosystem, as it responds to man-made threats

like climate change, pollution and fishing, will take time.

But this project will eventually provide a view of the impact people

are having on this environment,, and on the wildlife that inhabits

our planet's last great wilderness.

Hello, welcome to the weekend.

It starts for Saturday with warm, sunny spells for many.

But the threat of heavy and thundery downpours for some.

In fact, this zone here, already first thing in the morning,

a few showers and thunderstorms starting to break out.