Not much of an animal person

I am really not an animal person. I know i have a cat but we really just occupy a similar time and space. I give her food and cuddles...she sheds cat hair all over my bed. Had a gold fish once. It died. I tell you this for dramatic purposes.

As a younger university student I think I was probably one of those people who made fun of “animal studiers”. Trust me there were a lot worse names for the people in offices next to ours that did not study maths/physics/rocks/weather and such. I know that they were nice people just sometimes the science seemed a little flaky to us. But we were young. Easily led. Opinionated for no good reason. Forgive us.

All that changed for me when i worked on a little paper about penguin colonies for my supervisor. I know. For most people it would have been when they saw real, live emperor penguins for the first time. Or a whale. But we have all known for quite some time that i am on a trailing edge of the “normal” spectrum.

He was doing some research related to an Emperor Penguin colony and he asked me to do some supporting work with some satellite images. The task itself wasn’t that complex or even interesting. It just allowed for the distance to the colony from open water to be determined. Simply put it allowed for one to be able to tell how far penguins with full tummies had to waddle back to hungry baby penguins.

Anyway one particular year the fast ice did not break up early enough and the returning birds had too far to go to get back to the colony. The babies died. This didn’t hit me until a long time after i had begun working on this project. The other people knew ‘cause that is what they wanted to find out about. Why so many chicks died. Being a programmer/researcher working with remote data you quite often don’t really think about what you are doing. About what is going on in “real time”.

The type of results which we found at like this sample chart (8 years). You can clearly see that the breeding success decressed the further the colony was to open water.

Wy i bring this up is because there was some internet chatter about more sea ice around the Antarctic. Trust me when i say that it is very difficult to measure such things. You need a big picture approach, great data and some big ones to make such statements. Always brings trouble to your door.

My point is that everything about this type of research has “complex system” written all over it. It is very difficult to predict from trending. I wouldn’t ever try. I work on a tiny, tiny part of the climate system and i am often unsure about what i think i know. Yet somehow everyone i meet, with no training at all, can tell me what is happening. Not that i begrudge them their opinion. I often wish i were so certain about things.

Here is a picture of emperor penguins and not me. I wanted you to appreciate just what great big birds these things are. I mean HUGE. It is quite freaky and really made me think about a time on this planet when a lot of our animals were big. I mean really big. No. Not dinosaurs. Just regular animals. Who were freakishly big.