Why must you drop everything to watch penguins in Antarctica? Hint: for the sake of science

Science needs your help! You have to keep a watch on them penguins. And the process is fairly simple – just go to penguinwatch.org, look at pictures of the birds, and point and click at all the penguins, chicks and eggs. A mindless but helpful exercise in the service of those cute little waddlers.

Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division and the University of Oxford have set up a camera monitoring programme asking people from all over the world to help label the pictures.

Called Penguin Watch, this is the revamped 2.0 version. The first one was rolled out in 2014. What’s different this time around is that people will be able to see the results of their online efforts to monitor and conserve Antarctica's penguins colonies, according to the BBC.

The project is set up to track the population of the Adelie and Chinstrap penguin colonies, which are declining on account of climate change. You can read the project goals in detail here.

With 75 cameras set up all over the Antarctic and sub Antarctic islands, this is the largest Antarctic citizen science venture in the world. The cameras take one picture every hour throughout the year. According to BBC, the scientists now have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of images they are yet to analyse.

“We can’t do this work on our own, and every penguin that people click on and count on the website – that's all information that tells us what’s happening at each nest, and what's happening over time,” Lead researcher Dr Tom Hart told the BBC.

The researchers explain on the website, “As top predators, penguins are considered sentinels of changes within their ecosystem. Because penguins spend the majority of their life in water and fall at the top of the food chain, any variations in their populations may represent larger changes to the dynamic Antarctic ecosystem.”

Below, a tutorial.