Site completed: End of Crimson Dew

Two weeks ago we completed the classification of yet another research site: Crimson Dew in West Africa. It is the seventh completed site since the start of Chimp&See and maybe the most successful one now. While classifying around 20,000 videos from this site, citizen scientists found over 750 of them containing chimps – far more than we have seen from other sites. Furthermore, we could identify a higher percentile of individual chimpanzees than before. This shows the steep learning curve of our citizen scientists, but is also caused by an apparent smaller community of chimps that has some very special and rememberable members. This blog already talked about some of them.

• Dodge, the one-armed chimpanzee
• Maggie-Ollie with her newborn baby Chibi – the first female, we could identify as a new mother after matching her beforehand based only on videos without an infant
• Pearl – a female with a pigmentation problem in her face skin and a baby (named Flocke) who loves to ride on her back in a very special way
• Ralph, who impressed us with power displays and drumming

Of course, there is always a number of videos without a confirmed chimp ID. Sometimes only an arm is seen, the chimps are traveling too fast, it is too dark, or they just do not show their faces or any other identifiable traits. The hilly landscape and the habit of the Crimson Dew chimps to travel together in groups made it not always easy to identify single members, but produced some great video footage.

The videos are now double-checked by the science team and subsequently analyzed to answer the ecological and behavioral questions of the project.

We would like to thank all our amazing citizen scientists involved in the classification of videos and identification of individual chimpanzees at Crimson Dew and hope you enjoy the new site Lingering Shape!