À l'écoute des manchots Série-Collection : Têtes chercheuses

Georges Laurent
1996 - 15 min - Betacam - Couleur - France

Yvon Le Maho, director of research at CNRS, presents the research of an international campaign involving king penguins carried out on Possession Island in the Indian Ocean.
The main activity of his laboratory, the Centre d'Écologie et de Physiologie énergétiques in Strasbourg, is studying the behaviour of these animals who manage to overcome extreme conditions of cold and energy.
The objectives of the campaign are as follows : determining the quantity of food gathered at sea by the penguins for their own needs and those of their chicks ; locating these marine resources ; analysing the differences in food gathering according to season and the stage that the penguin has reached in its reproductive cycle ; studying these results from an ecological point of view.
These data are obtained thanks to the monitoring system set up on the penguins who are equipped with electronic tabs, Argos beacons and miniaturised data-collecting systems.