South Pole Episode 13: Exploring Antarctica’s Wildlife from Space

In this episode of South Pole, we explore the use of satellite imagery to track Weddell seals and Emperor penguins in Antarctica. Dr. Michelle LaRue, a leading researcher in the field, explains how high-resolution imagery from space provides crucial insights into these marine predators' populations, habitats, and behaviors. We dive into the challenges of studying wildlife remotely, the surprises in population estimates, and the innovative Satellites Over Seals (SOS) project. Tune in to discover how this technology is shaping our understanding of Antarctic ecosystems and its potential for future research and conservation efforts.

Episode Guest: Dr. Michelle LaRue

Find more on Dr. LaRue at the University of Canterbury 

Visit Dr. LaRue’s website

Find Dr. LaRue’s children’s book, Emperor Penguin (Young Zoologist)

Episode Transcript  and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese 

Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong. 

Theme music by Nela Ruiz

Transcript:

[00:00:01.880] - Clark

Hello, and welcome to another episode of South Pole, the podcast that explores everything Antarctica. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about penguins, Weddell Seals, Why They Love Each Other, Satellite Imagery, and Species from Space. Our guest for today is Dr. Michelle LaRue, an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a leading researcher in the field of Antarctic marine predators. Dr. LaRue uses high-resolution satellite imagery to track and study animals. She tracks their populations and behaviors, and she has looked at animals all over the world, but in Antarctica, she focuses on Weddell Seals and Emperor penguins, learning more about them from space. It's a pretty interesting episode, in my opinion, and it explores the intersection of cutting-edge technology and wildlife research. I think without further ado, let's Let's go ahead and get started. All right. Welcome to the show, Dr. LaRue. It's wonderful to meet you. The first question I have is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.

[00:01:37.520] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah, my name is Dr. Michelle LaRue, and I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. My research really is focused on trying to understand marine predators in the Southern Ocean. Some of the questions I'm interested in are fairly basic. It's where are they located, how many are there, and how do they interact with their environment. The way that I to do that is by looking at them from space. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, a lot like you'd see on Google Earth. I use that imagery to basically look at them and count them and learn all of these things. It's been really interesting. I've learned a ton in the past couple of years, but that's, I guess, where my research tends to focus is on the Southern Ocean.

[00:02:20.610] - Clark

Wow. You might actually have one of the coolest jobs on Earth.

[00:02:23.910] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah, I'm really lucky.

[00:02:26.580] - Clark

Well, I'm sure you worked very hard for it, too. One question I ask at the top is if your research has ever taken you down to Antarctica, but I suppose if the data that you are looking at is collected from satellite imagery, maybe it's possible to do that remotely. I'm not sure, but I guess I'll just give you the question all the same. Have you ever been down to Antarctica? Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences there?

[00:02:48.570] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. So interestingly enough, I went to Antarctica a couple of times before I ever started doing research on animals from space. So the first time I went to Antarctica was in December of 2008. And I was with a group where we were basically trying to create better maps of the McMurdo dry valleys. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time. I knew I was very, very lucky, but I just didn't know how lucky I think that I got to do some camping in the McMurdo dry valleys and fly around in helicopters and take ground control points to try to make the maps a little bit better. That was my first trip actually out of the United States. I'm originally from the US. My first trip out of the United States was actually to Antarctica, which is a pretty memorable trip in the first place. I I remember when I was planning to go for the first time that somebody who'd been a bunch had told me this advice, which was, as soon as you get off the plane, you have to stand on the ice and just look around because it is absolutely unlike anything else you've ever seen.

[00:03:44.780] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

They're like, They're going to try to get you onto the bus and get you to McMurdo as soon as possible. But she said, Just sit there for 10 seconds at least and just look around and pay attention. This was just a very unbelievable, it's unlike anything else in the world. And so I've been to Antarctica now a total of 10 times since 2008. And I would say I've been studying animals from space for about 13 years, maybe 14 years or so.

[00:04:12.500] - Clark

Wow. Yeah. I can imagine that would have been a very impactful first trip. And I guess you're still at it, right? I know that you've also used satellite imagery to map some animals that are outside of Antarctica. Can you tell me about what those animals are, too, and where they live?

[00:04:26.050] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. So the other work that I've done using the idea of the animals from space has also focused in the Arctic, so literally the other side of the world. I've looked at polar bears and attempted to look for muscoxon as well in the Arctic. The muscoxon were very difficult to find. The polar bears, as it turns out, are fairly easy to see if you know what you're looking for and if you're looking at the right time of year for them to come on land. In that case, there are these bright white animals on a dark background, which is basically the opposite of how Weddell Seals, which live in the Antarctica, look because they're black little dots on white ice. I've gotten really good at identifying very small objects on the landscape and counting them.

[00:05:11.110] - Clark

Okay, so lots of different species from space. Today, I think we'll spend most of the time talking about Seals. You have used this satellite imagery to count Weddell Seals in the Antarctica. Can you tell me a bit about this Satellites Over Seals Project? Sos, I think it's called?

[00:05:25.170] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Oh, gosh. Good question. Okay. Everything I can tell you about the Satellites Over Seals project was born out of the knowledge that we could see the animals from space. So that was really exciting and really cool. But that was matched with this really difficult prospect of actually doing it, like Looking at the entire coastline around Antarctica is a huge undertaking. And so I partnered with my colleague, Luke Barrington, who was one of the cofounders of a web app basically called Tomnod. And what that allowed you to do is to have anyone in the world who had an Internet connection could log in and look at these high-resolution images with us and help us understand where the animals are. I was flabbergasted, actually, that they were even interested in collaborating with me in the first place because Who am I? Just some random researcher who wanted to count seals from space, but they were very interested, and so that was really exciting. We wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation, and I couldn't believe that it got funded. That was basically the beginning of, I think, a lot of really cool research projects since. We learned a ton.

[00:06:33.700] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

We learned that people are really interested in looking at animals from space. We ended up having about 300,000 people come through and help us look for what else seals from space.

[00:06:45.200] - Clark

Okay. Citizen science. We love it. Can I ask what the data tells us about the seals?

[00:06:50.260] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

We learned that what else seals are very patchily distributed. We thought they were uniformly distributed around the Antarctica, and it turns out that that's not the We also figured out that there's only about a quarter of the number of animals as we thought we were going to find. Like the previous estimates from decades ago was about 800,000 or so what else seals would be thought in Antarctica. This time around, we found about 202,000 female seals. So quite a lot fewer than we had originally thought. I guess the last thing I'll say is we also learned a lot about their habitat and why they are in these locations. We figured out that they like to be nearby Emperor of as long as the nearby Emperor Penguin colony isn't too big. They prefer to be farther away from a deli of penguins, which I think is funny because the deli of penguins are very small compared to a what else, but they apparently don't like to be nearby them so much. We really learned a lot about how many there are, where they're located. Now what that does is it allows us to move forward and say, Okay, over time, how are these animals doing?

[00:07:56.530] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Are they doing better? Are they doing worse? What causes their populations to fluctuate? We've got all kinds of questions that we can begin to ask now because of that research.

[00:08:04.170] - Clark

Okay, I'm going to ask you about those ones, too. But first, I just have to know, do we know why they prefer the Emperor penguins to the Adele penguins?

[00:08:11.440] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I have no idea, actually. I think at the moment, it's just a correlation. We just saw that they tend to like being nearby Emperor penguins. That makes sense because they're on the same type of habitat. They both need fast ice connected to the continent. I think that's more or less just they need to be in the same place, and so they prefer to be nearby them. The Adele Penguin one is a little bit more perplexing because it makes slightly less sense, but the idea could be that they're going after the same type of prey, which is Antartic silverfish. It's this fish that's maybe about But it can get big and maybe about this big or so. And they both will go after that same type of fish. They'll go after different size classes, but it's the same type of fish. And so is there potentially some competition between the seals and the penguins? I don't know yet. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But those are the kinds of questions that I think these really large scale surveys can help at least identify as a question to answer.

[00:09:11.690] - Clark

Okay, I'm interested to learn a little bit more about this methodology. You said you were working with 300,000 people. So do you basically just make the satellite footage accessible to people and then we just start counting them? How does this all come together?

[00:09:23.960] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. So what Tomna did was they were purchased by a digital globe in, I forget what year, but what they are able to do or were able to do at the time was, you're correct, to take those high-resolution images and make them accessible to anyone in the world. And so, yeah, the way this would work is if you're interested in counting seals, you would go to tomnod. Com and show up and start scanning around and seeing if you could see seals. It was a fairly straightforward prospect. It was a little bit more difficult on the analytical side of things when we got our analysis or We got our results back and we realized that people tended to overcount seals quite substantially. We had to have clever ways of correcting for those over counts. We came up with a way of doing it, which was really great in a robust statistical way. But yeah, it was really great. It was really fun to see so many people excited to see little black dots on the ice as much as I was.

[00:10:22.850] - Clark

I got to ask about the Seals, and I'm a little bit scared. You mentioned that the numbers that you saw were quite fewer than you were expecting. Do we know if that's because there's been some horrible trend or a decline in population, or if perhaps the original estimate was just severely skewed? What might explain that?

[00:10:39.020] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Basically, what we know at the moment is we don't know. Any of those things could be true, but we simply don't know. I don't think we'll ever really be able to compare accurately between those two time frames, primarily because the data were collected in completely different ways. So 40, 50, 60 years ago, those estimates were derived from ship-based observations, and so the ships can only get so far into the ice. They're looking at probably a different demographic that we were looking at, and there's only so many places they could go and only be there for so long. That's one way of going about it. That's not inaccurate in any way. It's just a different way of gathering the data. For us, what we were able to do is get a full snapshot in the month of November around the fast ice. That's the ice that's right next to the Antartic continent. That's a place where ships typically can't get into. We're looking at a place that ships just can't see, and we were able to do it from space. Two completely different ways of looking at the same kinds of information. I don't think that we can really compare.

[00:11:42.570] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I think now what I would say is We have a fairly solid baseline as of 2011 of how many female what else sales there were in 2011. I think from this point forward, providing we collect the data in the same way and that we don't change things too much, we should be able to make comparisons from 2011.

[00:12:01.650] - Clark

Okay, so it's not necessarily true that hundreds of thousands of Seals have disappeared. Thank God. So we're tracking the number of Seals. What other data points are we looking for besides that?

[00:12:12.050] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. So some of the other things that we look for is how many cracks are on the ice, if there's icebergs nearby, how far away from the coastline the ice goes. All of that information is really helpful for us because that gives us an idea of some of the things that the seals prefer. So we find that they tend prefer this optimum amount of fast ice. It can't be too extensive, but it also can't be too minimal. They like to have cracks in the ice. That gives us a little bit of an understanding of the fine scale habitat features that they tend to like.

[00:12:45.680] - Clark

Has the data been around long enough for us to identify any trends in either their behaviors or the population size?

[00:12:52.440] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I wouldn't say it's been around for long enough. The thing about what else deals in particular is that they can live a really long time. They can live upwards of 30 years. Even if we started with 2011 as that baseline, that's only been 13 years, and that's a middle-aged at most, probably still a young, actually, what else deal, right? If they were born in 2011. Ideally, If you want to have an idea of how the trends are in a population, you'd want to have several generations worth of data. And so arguably, we would want to wait until 2060 or something like that before we would have an idea of how the populations are doing. That doesn't mean that we're not going to continually check. We absolutely will and are. But to really have an understanding of how populations are doing and what drives those populations to increase or decrease, we really need a lot of data.

[00:13:41.200] - Clark

That makes sense. Also, you mentioned that they might prefer more or less cracks in the ice. I'm wondering why that might be important, and also what level of cracks do they prefer?

[00:13:50.970] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah, that's a great question. The reason what else deals... Let me rephrase. The reason adult female what else deals like cracks in the fast ice is because that's where they haul out of the water to give birth to their pups. The reason the fast ice is so great is because it gives them a lot of protection from the only predators that would go after them, which are other air-breeding predators like leopard seals or killer whales. If they have this distance from the edge of the fast ice all the way back where these cracks are happening, they've got some really safe places to give birth to their pups. The other thing I'll mention, too, is that the cracks are created by tidal action. The tides go up and down, and that's what causes these cracks in the ice. Oftentimes, you'll see seals deep in the fast ice near some islands or near headlands or places where the ice meets the land. Then that tide goes up and down and it creates that crack in the ice, and so they're able to get out and give birth to their pups and raise them. It's a really nice, safe place for them to be.

[00:14:53.030] - Clark

Okay, well, that's fascinating. Turning then to the future of collecting this type of data, maybe I'll ask you what research questions that we still have about the Seals?

[00:15:03.030] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Oh, man, where do I begin? Research questions about what else Seals. I think you hit on it a little bit earlier, just a minute ago, which is how are they doing and what causes their populations to fluctuate. Again, start to get at that question by looking at trends and seeing if we can start to get some glimpse. Again, we're going to need a lot of data to really better understand if there's an environmental factor that influences their population. That's one major one is, what causes their populations to go up or down? Is it environmental factors? Is it being too close to another nearby seal colony? Do the penguins have an influence? Is there an influence of predators or something? I mean, there's all kinds of things that could cause their populations to fluctuate. We don't know that. I think another question that comes to mind that a lot of people, I think, go to right away because it's in the Antarctica is climate change. Whether or not climate change is having an impact on them, how their populations are likely to do as the sea ice changes, the sea surface temperature changes. There's all kinds of questions that are like that that are definitely still out there and that we need to address.

[00:16:13.530] - Clark

It sounds like this satellite technology might be really instrumental in helping us answer those questions, right?

[00:16:19.610] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. I mean, the nice thing about the satellite imagery is that you can, quite literally, it's a remote sensing. You can literally have a remote view of anywhere around Antarctica, providing the clouds aren't in the way. That's the one major issue with the optical imagery is that if clouds get in the way or if it's a crappy day that can make it really difficult or impossible to see them. But otherwise, if you get a nice, clear image and it's a fast ice, there's a probability that there might be seals there. It's safe, it's effective, it's efficient, and it can really give us a lot of information that we wouldn't have normally had because we don't have to physically get to some of those places. I think that's a huge benefit of using the remote sensing.

[00:16:59.030] - Clark

With all this data to be collected and these satellites that make it easy, will we continue to rely on citizen scientists for these types of projects? Are there any opportunities that you know of or could see happening in the future where people who are interested might be able to get involved?

[00:17:12.650] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah, that's a really good question. I actually don't know what the prospects are for citizen science in the future because the platform that I mentioned, Tom Nad, has now changed around quite a bit and has been bought and changed names and changed hands. I'm not sure how that platform is operating anymore. I'd love to believe that there would be a way forward to involve volunteers again, but I'm just not sure how that might work. If it did, I think we've learned a ton the first time around to be able to do it better the next time we try it. I guess watch this space and hopefully we'll be able to find out a way to do it at some point in the future.

[00:17:49.650] - Clark

Perfect. I also read that one of the motivations for collecting this type of data is potentially to inform policy. Do you have any specific policy recommendations that this research might inform, perhaps to protect the seals or any other conservation measures of any kind?

[00:18:04.410] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. So one of the policy, I guess, decisions or pieces of information that's drastically needed is obviously how many what else seals there are in an area in particular in the Ross Sea, which is now the largest marine protected area in the world. And the reason they're one of the key species we want to know how many there are and how they're doing is because they are important predators of Antartic toothfish.

[00:18:28.490] - Clark

Toothfish. Guys, Anyone listening, you have to go back and listen to our episode on Antartic Toothfish with Dr. Jildra Kacabo. Definitely one of my favorite interviews I've ever done.

[00:18:36.460] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

We fish for Antartic Toothfish. It ends up on our plates as Chilean sea bass. There's this question about, are we fishing sustainably? Are we having an impact that can't be undone? That question is still out there. I think at the moment, we don't know one way or the other if it's impacting what else deals at all. As a matter of fact, we don't really know what causes their populations to go up and down, as I mentioned earlier. I think there's still a lot of questions out there, but that's the policy or the information that international organizations and international policy needs is how many steels are there, how many penguins are there? That will help inform whether the protection is helping or doing its job or if there needs to be some other types of protections in place, and we simply don't know the answer to that. So yeah, that's where I would hope that some of the work that I do would be able to help provide that information.

[00:19:31.420] - Clark

Speaking of penguins, are we using this data to track Penguin populations as well, or are there any specific research questions that you have for penguins?

[00:19:39.110] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

We do use the high-resolution imagery to look for them as well. It's done in a little bit of a different way than we do with what else seals. In the case of Emperor of Penguins, what we have to do is, while we could go through and identify every single little black dot that we see on the ice, that would take a really long time and be very inefficient. What we do instead is we train the computer to tell the difference between the Penguin pixels and other pixels on the landscape. We're basically just saying, Okay, here's what a pixel of Penguin looks like. We train the computer enough and then say, Okay, do the entire image and then tell me how many Penguin pixels there are. Then using ground information from roughly the same time frame, we can then use that information to say, Okay, if we counted, say, I don't know, 10,000 square meters of Penguin pixel, how many penguins were actually there on that day? That's how we go about looking for Emperor penguins. We actually just found over the past 10 years or so, we found there's a probability of decline of about 10% of Emperor penguins in the springtime.

[00:20:41.050] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

But the one caveat that I have there is that it's a really, really specific group of penguins that we're counting. There's definitely, in my opinion, not quite... We don't need to be raising alarms just yet. I think there's more information that we need to better understand before we get too concerned. It's worse than being stable, obviously, or increasing, but we don't know exactly what is the cause of that decline. It could just be that we're catching fewer of them. It could be that we are seeing them have lower breeding success. There's all kinds of things that it could be. It might not be necessarily the fact that the birds are dying.

[00:21:19.760] - Clark

We talk a lot on the show about compounding issues and the different and multiple ways that species are under threat, and I hope we can get to the bottom of it. I hope that this satellite technology might even be able to help us find those answers. I'm also glad that we have a lot of people working on this. I think we're going to start to round out to the last final questions. The first of which is, is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you think we should mention about either these projects or about your research in Antarctica more broadly?

[00:21:44.200] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I don't know. I guess the one thing I like to think about is there's a lot of nuance, and there's also a lot of things that can be confusing when it comes to thinking about Antarctica. Just as an example, ICE. There's There's land ice, there's glacier ice, there's sea ice, and in sea ice, there's fast ice and pack ice. We don't really have an idea of how the fast... To my knowledge, we don't really have an idea of what's going to happen with the fast ice, which again is that it's sea ice, frozen ocean water, but it's connected to the land. That's where the Seals and the Emperor penguins, live. But the pack ice is the ice that's out in the middle of the ocean. That's the ice where we're seeing these declines now, where there used to be actually an increase in the extent of the Antarctica pack ice. We're now seeing this very, very strong decrease over the past few years, but it's in the pack ice. That's not to suggest it's not worrying. It definitely is. But there's nuance here when it comes to what's going to happen to those two animals in particular, the upper penguins and the white osseals that live on the fast ice.

[00:22:50.240] - Clark

Maybe just to follow up on that, do we have enough data to show how their behavior has changed on account of that trend with the ice, or is it still too early?

[00:22:57.360] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I think it's still too early to tell. Again, the reason for that is because they're also a fairly long-lived species. I think they can live up to maybe 25 years, so it's going to take a while to really see how they're doing.

[00:23:10.440] - Clark

Got it. Now I'm going to ask you, what is your favorite thing about Antarctica?

[00:23:14.800] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I think my favorite thing about Antarctica is probably the Emperor of Penguins. They never get old. Whittle Seals never get old either. But seeing an Emperor of Penguin walking on the ice is my heart always just... This is going to sound corny, but it skips a beat a little bit. It's just like, Oh, my God, they're just so beautiful and magnificent. I think my favorite thing about Antarctica is the Emperor of Penguins.

[00:23:38.430] - Clark

No, I mean, that's definitely a good choice. They might be the most charismatic, charismatic megafauna we have on Earth.

[00:23:43.980] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

I think so. Yeah.

[00:23:46.760] - Clark

All right, then. Well, the last question I have for you is where can people find you and follow your work?

[00:23:50.300] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Yeah. I have a website. My website is absolutely named drmichellelarue. Com. I am on Blue Sky now, and it's @drmichellelarue. I think if you googled me, my name, and University of Canterbury, you would see my website there as well. Yeah, so those are the places. Oh, and then also I do have a children's book about Emperor of Penguins that is available for a purchase as well. It was a lot of fun. Those are the, I guess, the recent things that I've been up to as far as where you could find me on the internet.

[00:24:20.620] - Clark

Perfect. I will be sure to include links to all of those things in the show notes for people to find easily. This is the part where I say thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for teaching us about the satellite project and also for your really important research in this space.

[00:24:31.560] - Dr. Michelle LaRue

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[00:24:51.210] - Clark

You've been listening to South Pole. You can find more information about this week's guest and links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for the show is done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Nela Ruiz. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. If you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. South Pole is part of a larger network of sciencey podcast called Pine Forest Media. You've got one on plastic, one on drinking water, and a couple of new ones coming out soon. You can find more information about us in the episode description as well. We're on our website at pineforestpods.com We are also on Instagram and the TikTok at pineforestmedia. If you love the show and you want to support science communication like this, a five-star rating across platforms and a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to help us reach more people and for the entire network to grow. All right, thank you to all of you who have made it this far, and we'll talk soon.