While most Iowa State faculty members are struggling through the winter’s snow and cold, four staff members are enjoying summer in Antarctica.

On Sept. 29 of this year, four ISU researchers, A. Kristmundsdottir, Wendy Reed, Terry Busch and Carol Vleck, took a plane to Chile where they caught the boat Polar Duke and sailed to Palmer Station on the Antarctic Continent. They will be staying for the next several months, said David Vleck an ISU zoology professor and Carol Vleck’s husband.

The expedition, which was funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will allow the ISU group to spend the next four months in Antarctica’s southern hemisphere to study the penguin breeding season, specifically the mating habits of penguins.

The study involves about 60 people. They are living at the smallest U.S. station in Antarctica. Their work will focus on how stress and large groups of people affect the reproductive processes of penguins.

Researchers hope to discover what reproductive steroids normally exist in penguins and what causes them to do unique things such as leaving the nest for extended periods of time to find food before returning to their young.

They would also like to find out how times of stress affect the reproductive cycles of both individual animals and the colony as a whole. A longer-term portion of the study will focus on being able to observe and eventually predict the conditions under which the penguins reproduce.