Happy Anniversary - 5 years of Chimp&See - Part 2

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Chimp&See! The Chimp&See citizen science project has been very busy lately with many new volunteers that we want to welcome to our project and community. These are frightening and confusing times for many, if not all people, who have to practice social distancing or self-isolate due to health concerns in the current Covid-19 pandemic. We're glad that we can provide many people with an opportunity to volunteer in our online project, to contribute to science, while staying safely at home. And while being here - you help us tremendously!

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!