A rover quietly surveys the forbidding icy landscape. Suddenly, it whirrs into life: it has spotted an emperor penguin. With its antenna set to scan, the 90-centimetre-long robot trundles towards the bird, searching for a signal from an RFID chip beneath the penguin’s skin – recording crucial information that may help us finally understand this enigmatic species.

The emperor penguin is instantly familiar as the star of countless nature documentaries and the 2005 movie March of the Penguins. This media exposure might give the impression that we have a solid understanding of its biology. We don’t. Almost all of that footage was collected from just two breeding colonies on opposite sides of Antarctica, constituting perhaps 10 per cent of the emperor penguin population. For decades, the hundreds of thousands of emperors living elsewhere along the continent’s coast were virtually unstudied.

That situation is now changing. Over the past 15 years, researchers have uncovered more about these birds using new technologies, including satellites that can spot colonies from space and AI-equipped robots to scan them on the ground. “I hope we’re starting to go into a golden age of research,” says Daniel Zitterbart at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts.

Already, the work has revealed subtle differences in the genetics and behaviour of the penguins at different points around the Antarctic coast, and shown that they are surprisingly adaptable to changing conditions. But these discoveries have been made amid rapid warming in the region, which led the US Fish and Wildlife Service to declare emperors a threatened species in 2022.…