Rockhopper Penguin Egg project!
Data collected and compiled by Dr. Alexander Bond
This is an endangered penguin found only on Tristan da Cunha, and the French islands of Amsterdam/St Paul in the Indian Ocean.
In the last century, its population has declined by >95%, from millions of birds to just over 150,000 pairs today. One of the potential factors influencing this decline is oceanographic conditions, which could manifest in changes in egg size. They lay 2 eggs/year (and oddly, the first is smaller). This project uses contemporary data on egg size (length & breadth), data from museum collections, and reconstruct data from published accounts (e.g. simulate data from a mean, SD, n) to examine how egg size has changed over the last 150 years. Dr. Bond has a published discriminant function that can be applied to the museum/literature eggs to predict laying order so one could eliminate that source of variance.