I spent months watching those little blue penguins on grainy red-lit screens, hoping for some sign that we weren’t just documenting their slow disappearance. The cameras caught everything—awkward fights, desperate parenting, a few flashes of affection that felt almost staged for us. I kept telling myself the data mattered, that it would help. But every time I logged another hour of footage, the numbers kept shrinking. Thirty left. Twenty-nine. I started measuring my work in what we’d lost, not what we’d learned. Sometimes I wonder if the real experiment was seeing how long I could keep caring before I stopped feeling anything at all. #Science #ScienceFatigue #FieldworkBlues