Are geese with symmetrical faces luckier in love? A citizen science project aims to find out

Visitors to Kangaroo Island are being asked to help scientists find out if Cape Barren geese with more symmetrical faces are more likely to be pair up and reproduce than their peers.

Love Birds is one of four new year-long projects in the Passport 2 Recovery program, which calls on tourists to gather data about wildlife and vegetation to track the environmental recovery from the bushfires of 2020.

Visitors to the South Australian island can download an app, answer questions about the geese and goslings they see, then upload photographs of the left and right sides of their faces. The responses will be analysed by researchers to see if those with more symmetrical faces are more attractive to their fellow geese.

Lead researcher Karen Burke Da Silva from Flinders University said the information provided through the app by visitors in 2023 for the program’s original projects had been very valuable.

So far, the data has been used to help monitor the recovery of the island’s koala population, which was reduced from 50,000 to about 5,000 in the 2020 bushfires, as well as the spread of the plant root pathogens on hiking trails.

The newly added projects ask visitors to observe and record the impact of their own presence while watching sea lions at Seal Bay; recording the details of native roadkill, and taking micro and macro plastic samples from the island’s beaches.

Bushfire recovery and environmental impacts

Professor Burke Da Silva says a PhD student had found small accumulations of micro plastics in several places on the island, with research being broadened to examine a larger number of beaches on all sides of the island.

“Having citizens arrive on beaches, rather than just laying out their towel and enjoying the beach, we’re going to ask them to do a little bit of sieving of the sand which will tell us about microplastics, but also to collect some of the microplastics they’ve found along the beach as well,” she said.

“If we find an area where there is accumulation then we can put in some microplastic collecting devices and that sort of thing into the future.”

Professor Burke Da Silva said the roadkill project involved using the app to record where animals had been killed by vehicles, the road conditions at the site, the type of animal killed and how old the remains might be.

She said while the main aim was to understand the recovery of the island’s wildlife from the fires the data could have another purpose.

“We know that Kangaroo Island before the fires had a lot of roadkill, especially down the Flinders Chase end of the island,” Professor Burke Da Silva said.

“We’re wanting to monitor what kind of animals are being impacted by traffic on the island and whether there are certain sections of the road or the highway where we might be able to encourage council to put up road signs, if it is clearly a consistent spot where animals are being killed.”

Visitors to the island are encouraged to download the app before they reach the island and to collect vials and equipment for samples from the Penneshaw ferry terminal on arrival.