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!