You, our absolutely incredible citizen scientists, got through the SoaringLeaf speciesID workflow SUPER FAST and before the end of the year!
Monday, December 28, 2020
Thursday, December 17, 2020
First Chimp&See Paper (and new PanAf paper): Chimpanzee Identification and Social Network Construction through an Online Citizen Science Platform
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Another site is finished – Twin Oaks in the beautiful Loango National Park in Gabon
Last week, volunteers finished classifications in all three workflows for the Twin Oaks site in Gabon. This site was pretty special. First, it was just a beautiful forest landscape with many fancy birds, great elephant footage, and far more leopard sightings that we ever had at any site before. The elephant and leopard mini-projects are still gathering evidence for individual identifications to know more about the number and demographics of these species at Loango National Park, so get involved here, if that’s your passion.
The Chimp&See leopard mini-project aims to identify individual leopards by comparing their unique coat patterns. |
Monday, October 5, 2020
New Dragonfly is finished – here the highlights!
With the help of many volunteers, we finished classifications last week at our West African site “New Dragonfly”. We annotated not only all subjects in general Species ID workflow, but also identified all “trotters” (hoofed animals) and primates to the species level. Thanks to everyone involved for the great effort!
What did we find? On the species level, we've seen waterbucks for the first time, many bushbucks close to the camera, and burly giant forest hogs. A special highlight for many has been the rich footage of pangolins and aardvarks in the wild. We do see them rarely and New Dragonly offered some really close looks.
On the chimp side, we are not quite done with matching all individuals seen and you are still invited to help with chimp identification at New Dragonfly. We already identified some very special chimps, like wonderful Grace here with her infant, but would love some input in discussions about the juveniles and some special males. Easiest to get involved is by following the link above and read the pinned discussions that have open proposals (marked with **), watch the videos and chimps in question, and tell us what you think.
Grace with her yet unnamed infant discovering the camera. Her unique face helped with identification. |
The chimps at New Dragonfly showed us plenty of tool use to collect ants with very fine sticks and delicate handling to avoid any biting, as well as honey extraction with long, sturdy sticks to gather honey from beehives in tree holes and underground nests. The tools are used here to open bee nests (e.g., by pounding) and to collect the honey. The chimp family in this video shows how it is done.
If you are not into chimp matching, Chimp&See has three workflows on a very special site at Gabon's Loango National Park - called Twin Oaks - open, where you can help annotate within the general Species ID workflow or specialize in primates or trotters identification. You can find the Loango Chimpanzee Project also on Twitter and Youtube.
If you aren't volunteering with us yet - please get involved and annotate African wildlife at Chimp&See!
Friday, September 18, 2020
New PanAf paper: Chimpanzees show greater behavioural and cultural diversity in more variable environments
An international team of researchers led by Ammie Kalan and Hjalmar Kühl of the Pan African Programme: the Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology compiled a data set combining fieldwork conducted by the PanAf at 46 field sites, plus an in-depth literature search on chimpanzee research. For 144 chimpanzee social groups they investigated the long-standing question of under which environmental conditions chimpanzees acquire more behavioural traits. They used their unique dataset to test whether chimpanzee groups were more likely to possess a larger set of behaviours if they lived in more seasonal habitats or habitats where forest cover repeatedly changed over the last thousands of years. The behaviours largely included tool use and more than half have been described as cultural in previous studies.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Rainforest Redux virtual seminar series with Dr. Ammie Kalan
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Facebook AI/PanAf collaboration update - Densepose: AI for orienting humans (and chimps) in space
In the example below you can see:
Top left panel - a still from the original video with 2 chimps
Top right panel - each of the body parts that can be detected by Densepose, head, hand, forearm, upper arm, torso, etc each coded in a different colour.
Lower left panel - the horizontal plane is coded for each body part. For example, the left side of the head is yellow, the right side is blue.
Lower right pane - the vertical plane is coded: the top of the head is yellow and the bottom is blue.
Put all together, the animal can be oriented in space!
Sunday, May 31, 2020
New PanAf paper: Chimpanzee Ethnography Reveals Unexpected Cultural Diversity
Chimpanzee groups each have their own unique termite fishing cultures
Wonga Wongue, Gabon |
Korup, Cameroon |
Goualougo, R-Congo |
Much like in human etiquette, not everything is about increased efficiency but rather about conforming to what the rest of the group is doing. In humans, this is observed in the different chopstick cultures across Asia. “For example, in Thailand and Japan not only are chopsticks somehow shaped differently, but the way they hold them differ as well, and this is very reminiscent of what we see here with chimpanzees. In La Belgique in Cameroon, chimpanzees fashion their stick by opening the fibers to obtain a long brush and then rest the termite-covered stick on their wrist while they eat. On the other hand, at another site in Cameroon called Korup, the chimpanzees do not make a brush at all and use their mouth to shake the inserted stick while it is in the mound”, explains Christophe Boesch.
La Belgique, Cameroon |
citation:
Boesch C, Kalan AK, Mundry R, Arandjelovic M, Pika S, Dieguez P, Ayimisin EA, Barciela A, Coupland C, Egbe VE, Eno-Nku M, Fay JM, Fine D, Hernandez-Aguilar RA, Hermans V, Kadam P, Kambi M, Llana M, Maretti G, Morgan D, Murai M, Neil E, Nicholl S, Ormsby LJ, Orume R, Pacheco L, Piel A, Sanz C, Sciaky L, Stewart FA, Tagg N, Wessling EG, Willie J, Kühl HS (2020) Chimpanzee Ethnography Reveals Unexpected Cultural Diversity. Nature Human Behaviour doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-0890-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0890-1
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Commentary: Chimpanzee termite fishing etiquette
Summary:
Human culture is unique. Or is it? A new study reveals unexpected cultural diversity in the fine-grained details of chimpanzee termite fishing behaviour. These novel findings shed light on the richness of chimpanzee cultural diversity and reveal a narrower gap between the cultures of humans and other apes
original citation
Boesch C, Kalan AK, Mundry R, Arandjelovic M, Pika S, Dieguez P, Ayimisin EA, Barciela A, Coupland C, Egbe VE, Eno-Nku M, Fay JM, Fine D, Hernandez-Aguilar RA, Hermans V, Kadam P, Kambi M, Llana M, Maretti G, Morgan D, Murai M, Neil E, Nicholl S, Ormsby LJ, Orume R, Pacheco L, Piel A, Sanz C, Sciaky L, Stewart FA, Tagg N, Wessling EG, Willie J, Kühl HS (2020) Chimpanzee Ethnography Reveals Unexpected Cultural Diversity. Nature Human Behaviour doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-0890-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0890-1
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Algae Fishing Chimps on BBCOne's docuseries 'Primates'
BBCOne's new show primates features our algae fishing chimp camera trap videos on episode 3 - Episode 1 airs tonight
You can watch it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000hrfv/primates-series-1-1-secrets-of-survival
Thursday, April 23, 2020
New Site Opened - Welcome to Twin Oaks in Central Africa (in collaboration with the Loango Chimpanzee Project, Gabon)
Access all the different workflows on the main page of chimpandsee.org
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Happy Anniversary - 5 years of Chimp&See - Part 2
Chimp&See recently (re-)opened a second research site “New Dragonfly” and we had our first glances on the highly-endangered Nigeria-Cameroonian chimpanzees, the only (of four) chimpanzee subspecies that we hadn’t seen to date. Although, there is momentarily no chimpanzee matching for this site on-going, you can watch and learn about excellent tool-use techniques of chimps here. We’ve already seen them using sticks to fish for termites in mounds and ants in trees. Highlights are certainly young chimps trying to master the techniques. In addition, there is wonderful cameratrap footage to watch about pangolins and aardvarks, two nocturnal and rarely seen species.
As a major milestone, we are about to finish our first site since re-launch “Xenon Bloom”. This site featured not only great footage of the socially busiest and most enthusiastic Guinea baboons, beautiful bushbucks, the most birds of prey of every site up to now, but also the – by far – most chimpanzee videos of all sites.
And those chimpanzees went fishing. For algae. They used a variety of sticks to fish algae from the flat riverbed to feed on them. This new tool use behavior that has only been documented on one other research site (outside of Chimp&See) came as a total surprise to the researchers. As the chimps are often fishing in groups, social interactions during or with tool-use added to the appeal of this videos and were a great leaning opportunity about chimpanzee behavior. We had great discussions about tool making, practicing and learning by young chimps, handedness, and the fact the chimpanzees seem to be much more reluctant to actually go into the water to get the prized items than the (young) baboons that had lots of fun playing in the ponds.
Although, the general Species ID workflow for Xenon Bloom is finished, we have still to follow-up workflows for monkey and prosimians and the ungulates of this site open. If you can’t get enough from those Guinea baboons, head over to the MonkeySee workflow. If you want to see new species and a different landscape – try the Species ID workflow New Dragonfly.
Classifying so many videos in such a short time wouldn’t be possible without many people who got involved, classify relentlessly, hashtag species, and ask questions. We are thanking all new volunteers who discovered Chimp&See during the last weeks and months. It is great to have you here and if you are new to cameratrap projects or African wildlife, don’t worry if you sometimes just don’t know. Please take you best guess in classification and asked the moderators and scientists on Talk for more information or to discuss a behavior with you.
But we also want to give a special shout out – it’s the fifth anniversary of our launch after all – to all the people who are part of the Chimp&See family for years now and shared our interest and work for longer or shorter periods over the years. We couldn’t and can’t do that without you!
Thank you! Dankeschön! Merci! ¡Gracias! Grazie! Děkuji!
To discover even more, get involved and be a citizen scientist at Chimp&See! But most importantly: Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay home!
Happy Earth Day and 5th Anniversary of Chimp&See - Part 1
Thor assisting with Chimp&See classifications |
Later today we will also post a very special blog post by @AnLand!
A big thank you to our current incredible moderators @yshish , @Boleyn , @HeikeW @AnLand and LauraKLynn (and our previous moderators @Quia, @ksigler, @jwidness ) and our science moderator @NuriaM who has been holding down the fort with chimp matching this last year!!
Also a huge thank you to our other science mods and translators who have helped make Chimp&See what it is today!: @PauDG @akalan @asgoffe @maureenmccarthy @vittoriaestienne @Pinkynz2 @coryphella @Selini11 @Yi-Chiao @Laura_Hag @BenjaminDeb @Buzharevski
The biggest thank you goes out to @SassyDumbledore herself, who created the newest incarnation of Chimp&See and who does ALL the behind the scenes heavy lifting here. She is amazing and I can never thank her enough for all she does to make things run smoothly!
A giant panthoot to The Zooniverse as well for hosting us and helping us with Chimp&See!
Finally, Thanks to YOU for being part of this amazing community and spending your time with us at ChimpandSee.org!
Monday, April 20, 2020
PanAf Algae Fishing Chimps on BBC's 'Primates'
Monday, April 6, 2020
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Ciao a tutti! ChimpandSee.org in italiano!
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Saturday, February 1, 2020
The very Best of 2019!
The project attracted again many volunteers helping us to classify and annotate our video clips. To date, more than 1,700 old and new volunteers are active and made over 300,000 classifications. We already identified quite a number of chimpanzees (see below for the volunteers’ favorite individuals) and could finally study algae fishing in chimpanzees up close with our cameratrap footage.
After leading the polls right from the beginning our lovely and strong Beatrice has to share the win of the "Chimp of the year 2019" with Ozzy! His votes made a big jump up in the last day. No doubt, he has fans, too. So, we have two winners: Beatrice, a female adult with at least one offspring in tow and Ozzy, an elderly looking adult male, who enjoys his food.
Thanks to all who voted, nominated, classified, and tagged videos at Chimp&See! We hope to see you around furthermore this year. Please come over and discover the secret life of chimpanzees.