New MonkeySee (part 2): Monkeys and prosimians at Xenon Bloom

In part 1 of this series, we introduced the new MonkeySee workflow. Here in part 2, we visit the first live MonkeySee workflow for the Xenon Bloom site, a mixed savannah and woodland habitat in West Africa. Let’s have a look at the monkey and prosimian species you can watch and learn about at Xenon Bloom. 

Category: Baboons

Guinea baboons (Papio papio) are the enthusiastic stars of the Xenon Bloom show. They are often seen in bigger troops and have a rich repertoire of social behaviors and vocalizations. Just go to Chimp&See and check out some special greeting rituals and other interesting aspects of their social life. We were very excited to see “play swimming” of juveniles as most primates are known to avoid getting wet.

Guinea baboons have thick, light reddish- to greenish-brown fur. Their faces are hairless, with purplish-black skin and the squared, a bit dog-like muzzle that is typical of baboons. Their rumps are bare and pinkish in color. Males have a mane, though sometimes subtle. Females can display bright pink swelling. The newborn infants have a considerably darker color than adults.
The Xenon Bloom site is situated where the geographic ranges of Guinea and olive baboons meet. Until now, we did only see Guinea baboons, but might encounter here olive baboons, too.

Category: Chlorocebus

The Green monkey (Chlorocebus sabaeus) is a medium-sized and semi-terrestrial monkey with light golden fur on the head, back and tail, and lighter gray or white fur on the chest and legs. The face and ears are dark, though lighter in younger individuals

Category: Colobus

We did not actually expect to see colobus monkeys in this rather open habitat. But surprisingly, there has been a King colobus in several videos already. The King colobus (Colobus ploykomos) is a species of Western black-and-white colobus. It has a black coat of rather long fur, especially on the back. The face is black, with a halo of short white fur around it that extends down the throat and chest, and the on the shoulders. The long tail is all white.

The surprise guest - a King colobus - in the back and a female Guinea baboon in the foreground

Category: Patas Monkey

The Patas monkey (Erythrocebus patas) is my personal favorite. Patas monkeys occupy exclusively the savannah grass- and interspersed woodlands. They almost never venture into closed forest habitat. It is the fastest-running primate and normally seen on the ground.

Patas monkeys are bright reddish-brown from the top of their head down the back of their body and their long slender tail. The face, chest and legs are a light to medium gray. They usually have a distinctive black line of fur at the brow line that may extend to the ears on either side. Males are much larger, with more dramatic coloration and a mane.

Category: Prosimians

Prosimians are not monkeys, but belong to a more primitive group of primates, along with lemurs. We use this new category for the nocturnal galagos and pottos

Galago

Galagos (genus Otolemur),  also called bushbabies are very small nocturnal primates. As many animals active at night, they have large eyes that glow in our infrared night footage. They have round ears and a rather bushy, long tail. They can be seen climbing, but are actually some formidable jumpers.

Potto (Perodicticus potto) 

The potto is another type of prosimian, nocturnal like the galago, but larger. It has a short tail, thick fur, large round eyes and lobster-claw like hands that it uses to grasp branches. It climbs slowly through the tree canopy, rather than jumping, and is rarely, if ever, on the ground. It will be a surprise when we actually see a potto at Xenon Bloom.

Xenon Bloom's MonkeySee classification interface lists some other species that might be seen here, but still haven't. Watch out for sooty mangabeys, red colobus, or Campbell's mona monkeys as well.

The primate descriptions in this post are based on the comprehensive Monkey Guide created by Chimp&See citsci moderator Kristeena Sigler.

Check out MonkeySee at Chimp&See and enjoy amazing primate clips from this beautiful West African landscape!

“MonkeySee” – primate mini-project: A big thank you and a little sneak preview

Although Chimp&See has its main focus on chimpanzees, other species, especially other primates, play an important ecological role in the African rainforest and their presence can be an indicator of biodiversity and potential disturbances at a site. The current Chimp&See annotation interface only supports the classification of monkeys in the broad category “other primates”. From site to site many different species of monkeys and even other primates like galagos and pottos are summarized here. These classification data do not allow differentiating species or giving any indication about the occurence of rarely seen species, like the endangered Western red colobus.

Early on in Chimp&See, we asked all volunteers to tag all species they can identify to the species level to improve the information that we get from the classification stage. We thank all volunteers who took this time over the years and engaged in ID discussions with the moderators and the science team for some rather difficult cases!

In addition, we used the current hiatus on Chimp&See to gather some very (very!) dedicated volunteers to finish tagging all primate videos and check hashtags and comments. As approximately 50% of our clips have been tagged during the site classifications, this adds to several thousand video clips! A very special thanks to @Batfan, @Corcaroli, @HeikeW, @midnightsun and @Snorticus, as well as the moderators coordinating this mini-project.

From left to right: Western red colobus, sooty mangabey, blue monkey, and olive baboon

These data can now be used to study single species of interest, their behaviors like reactions of baboon to our camera traps in our “Animal Selfies” mini-project and even potential interactions with chimpanzees like scavenging of leftover nuts from chimpanzees nutcracking sites by sooty mangabeys.

And we have good news for all the primate fans among you! The science team decided to use the current relaunch of Chimp&See (in progress) on the Zooniverse Panoptes Project Builder to integrate a new workflow dedicated solely to monkeys and prosimians (galagos and pottos) into Chimp&See. This new workflow that aims to identify all primates to the species level already during classification, leaving room for tagging exemplary videos and interesting behaviors and thus saving time. Stay tuned for the new Chimp&See interface!

Again pant hoots and thanks to everybody engaged in this mini-project “MonkeySee”!

Birds of a feather

If you’ve been browsing the discussion boards on Chimp&See Talk, you may have noticed there is a new species guide: Identifying Birds.  The guide is meant to serve as a starting point for those wanting to improve their ID skills for the birds we see at C&S.  I know I certainly got more acquainted with the birds we have seen while writing the guide and I feel more confident identifying species now. I hope the guide helps others to do the same!

Screenshot of a portion of the bird guide

The guide can be found in The Objects section of the Help board or simply click on the link above.

The guide groups species by broad, shared characteristics that should be discernible even to those inexperienced with bird ID (poultry-like birds, predatory birds, etc.).  There is also a list of species we most often encounter at the top of the guide, so check those descriptions first if you are uncertain where to begin.  Each species has a short physical description as well as images and links to videos from C&S to aid in identification.

Thank you to all the moderators who provided help and feedback for the guide and to everyone for their continuing efforts with the C&S project!

Fly high and happy tagging!

Restless Star classifications done!...but still LOTS of chimps to match and name!

Thanks to everyone for helping us complete our 12th site on Chimp&See!!! You make it all possible :D

In total we had 63,428 video clips classified - one of our biggest sites yet!

Restless Star took us to east Africa and was jammed packed with chimps, gorillas and some tourists! we also had a few surprises along the way like a red duiker and l'hoests monkey hanging out (found by ksigler), some great galago/bushbaby vocalizations and bounciness (found by AnLand), gorgeous red duiker and black-fronted duiker selfies (found by Snorticus and daleh), a melanistic golden cat named Hootch (this clip for example as found by jwdiness), some sweet elephants (found by Snorticus) and a pretty perfect jackal portrait (thanks to Snorticus and zoogirl1).

Not only did we have some mega chimp groups but we were also treated to calmer moments like super peaceful David, just hanging out on a vine (found by Corcaroli and named by puddock) and the sweetest juvenile gorilla hug ever (found by AnLand)!

Restless Star has also been super exciting since it seems we have multiple large chimp groups caught on the cameras! You can check out the evidence in the discussions like this one and this one.

Check out our best of Restless Star highlight reel:

Chimp Matching at RestlessStar!

A whopping 98 (!!!) chimps have been identified and 45 of them matched and named at Restless Star! There are still LOTS of open discussion boards and 53 unnamed chimps waiting for people to weigh in on! You can find the discussions needing attention by checking out the Restless Star Discussion Board and looking for the discussions highlighted with asterisks ** (make sure to check out all the pages on the board!)

If you are new to chimp matching this is a great way to start. Check out the discussion, look at the proposed matches and see if you think the chimps match or not, then post with your thoughts and comments :) every person's opinion helps and very often we let people who help with the discussions give the names to the chimps - so join in!

An extra big THANK YOU and pant hoots to our science team mod Maureen McCarthy who has been overseeing all the chimp matching at Restless Star! And as always a big round of pant hoots to our amazing mods who keep everything running smoothly every day! Thank you ksigler, AnLand, jwidness, yshish and Quia! 

What's next?
Right now classification focus will continue at our west African site "Aged Violet" for a little while longer. But we hope to be uploading another site as soon as possible! So go to chimpandsee.org and classify some videos today!

Zooniverse cross-post: Primary School Zooniverse Volunteers

How the chimp 'Kibu' was named :) Thank you so much to the students of ZŠ Brno, Jihomoravské náměstí (a primary school in the Czech Republic) and their teacher Zuzana Macháčková!

http://blog.zooniverse.org/2016/02/19/primary-school-zooniverse-volunteers/
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We're Back! New site opening and a slightly new way to do chimp IDs :)

AND WE'RE BACK! Tons of new videos uploaded! Lots of new animals to annotate and more chimps to match and name!

Also, we are going to start doing things a little bit different with the chimp naming - we will wait until the end of each site to name all the infants - so anyone that has participated in discussions leading to a match will get to give a chimp name, even if they did not propose the match in the first place smile emoticon

So even if you do not feel super confident with your chimp identification abilities - come and join a discussion on chimp matching, you still might get to name a chimp! http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000l

and of course please visit us at chimpandsee.org!

Why We Name Chimps

One of the unique aspects of volunteering on Chimp & See is the ability to give names to the chimpanzees that we discover in the camera trap footage.  Naming primates in research is common, though it hasn't always been.  Jane Goodall disrupted convention when she gave names to the chimps she studied in Gombe, rather than just numbers.  But she knew, as we have all come to know, that each of these animals is an individual, with unique personalities and life stories that must be acknowledged in order to understand them.

In some research organizations, however, naming is still frowned upon, based on the idea that anthropomorphizing subjects can lead to misinterpretation of behaviors, or other biases. On the other hand, animal researchers who name their subjects are able to form closer bonds with them, which results in better care, just as we see with pets (or cars, or boats!).

Since we're trying to identify individuals at C&S, keeping track of which chimp is RWMale03 or RWMale23 can get cumbersome.  So giving a chimp a memorable name is helpful for discussing matches, if nothing else.  As for bias, our sharp citizen scientists don't let naming influence their judgment.  For example, there is the case of Maggie-Ollie, previously thought to be 2 individuals, Maggie & Ollie.  We've also encountered chimps where we initially believed the gender to be male (Charles) or female (Sherri), but closer inspection revealed the opposite.  In all cases, the name choices didn't introduce assumptions that prevented our volunteers from continuing their objective evaluation.

Chimps "Mario" and "Luigi" from the Crimson Dew site

Character images displayed as fair use for educational/research purposes

As mentioned in a previous post ("Chimps as individuals"), volunteers have named well over 100 chimps so far!  We've seen a few different methods for choosing names:

• Some chimps are named based on a physical trait, such as Belle (a chimp with an especially "pretty" face) and Roux (French for red, to honor this red-haired lady), or a personality trait, such as King (a large older male who seemed respected in his group) and Abile (as in "clever," for a juvenile who was adept with tools).
• Others are named after real people or fictional characters, like Mario and Luigi (of video game fame), Greg (after TV character Greg House, for a chimp with an injured leg), and Christine (the name of one volunteer's wife) and Teddy (named after a volunteer's son).
• Finally, some volunteers opt for unconventional names with deeper meaning, for example, Ajali (meaning "chance" in Swahili), Deka (meaning "pleasing"), and Selve (meaning "forest" in French).  These types of names are especially safe bets when the gender isn't certain!

Regardless of how the names are chosen, they always seem to be a good fit!  Plus, it's fun, and a bit of a honor for both the namer and namee!  So much so that the practice has spread to other memorable animals we identify, such as Buster the one-tusked warthog (left tusk), Leroy - the other one-tusked warthog, (right tusk), Molco the green monkey with the broken tail, Rozalie the one-horned Jentink's duiker, and others.

See all our unique chimp (and other animals') names here.  Then, head over to the discussion boards and jump in on the matching process. What do you think would be a good name for a chimp?  If you can help us identify a new one, your name may be chosen for them!

Chimps as individuals

At Chimp & See, we ask our volunteers to accomplish two different tasks. First, we need their help classifying many hours of video material from camera traps in Africa in terms of the species and number of wild animals they contain. Secondly, if one or more chimpanzees are found in a video, we want to identify them in order to better estimate population size and answer other ecological and behavioral questions (like association patterns and cultural transmission).

While other citizen science projects like Snapshot Serengeti and WildCam Gorongosa are similar in terms of annotating all animals present, Chimp & See is one of the first projects (another one is Whales as Individuals) to attempt identifying individual animals from camera footage. In the beginning, the science team was not sure if volunteers would be able to identify individual chimps, but is happy that it works very well. We now know that with a bit of effort and guidance many can learn this skill.

Identifying (i.e., matching) chimpanzees means finding out whether a chimp in two different situations (video sequences) is the same chimp or not. The matching is considerably harder than classification itself as everyone in the project can tell. First of all, we are mostly observing chimp communities that are unhabituated to human presence. Little is known about the individual chimpanzees at each research site and so we cannot compare them to a well-lit high-resolution picture and a list of his/her features known in advance. These chimps are new to all of us – and with each site progressing, we try to get to “know” them better and recognize features that enable us to identify them as individuals. A second level of difficulty arises from the chimps themselves. The chimps hardly ever stand still in front of the camera to allow a good look at all sides of their body and face and show the specific individual traits we can rely on.

Achenar is a male adult chimp with a boxy head missing his right ear.

The traits should ideally be permanent, but temporary ones like wounds might be recognizable at least a few days or maybe even weeks. Basically every distinctive feature can be seen as a trait and support the match, starting with general body size and build, missing limbs, fur color, bald spots, number of digits (fingers and toes), and pigmentation of face, hands, and ears. The face can be narrow, round, triangular. Small or bigger scars can be visible on body and face. Ears can be bent, have cuts, or be missing altogether. A recurrent topic is the distinctiveness of the baldness pattern on the forehead that is partly already seen in infants. More behavioral traits like a special gait (how a chimp walks) or handedness are often hard to compare, as camera perspectives are rarely the same, but observing it can support a difficult match. For all these and many more features one could think of, it does not matter whether the volunteers know the correct scientific term or can provide a full list of features the chimp has. A lay description is sufficient to discuss with others and the science team. The wisdom of the crowd generates very good results.

Female chimp Esme is quite old and has a badly damaged left ear

Once an individual chimp is identified, a volunteer who has participated in the matching discussion can propose a name for this chimpanzee. Up to now, we identified and named more than 100 chimps at different research sites.

During the year, I will introduce individual chimps and show how we came up with a specific match. Following is irregular series, you can learn what to look for when comparing two chimps, how to deal with different camera angles and black-and-white footage, and how hard it is to identify infants and often even juveniles.

A first example: Timur

This old and weathered looking male from Quiet Wood (a site in Central Africa) has been identified as part of our “throwback” initiative that aimed to take a second look at the very first research sites up at Chimp & See after some months of experience with the video footage.

Timur helped us a lot with his identification as he always stopped in front of the camera and stayed there for some invaluable seconds just looking around. Even with different lighting – including black-and-white footage from evening twilight – his facial and bodily features were clearly seen: a flat head, pointy and undamaged ears, straighter brows, big eye sockets, and the flat nose with long nostrils. In some footage, the lips look lacerated and an underbite has been discussed. In addition to quite a lot of gray fur at the lower back and legs he has a unique pink patch on the right side of his butt. It is not clear whether this is a wound, scar or something else, but the footage spans over several months and it does not go away.

Full screen picture here

Full screen picture here

Back views (two months apart): same pattern of gray
and a pinkish patch on the right side of his butt.

Timur has been named (by me ☺) after confirmation of the proposed match by the science team. He has been seen in three different video sequences over the course of four months.

• The tag group with all videos of Timur can be found here: http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/collections/CCPL0000eu 
• The discussion leading to this match can be read here: http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP0000004/discussions/DCP0000fvj

You can join the matching discussions at Chimp & See!

Red Chimp from Dry Lake - Roux

A new site called Dry Lake is up on chimpandsee.org and we have lots of new species at this site which features chimps living in a savannah-woodland habitat. We are seeing a lot of things we haven't seen before like this gorgeous brown/red female chimp!

Join the discussion here: http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000o/discussions/DCP0000g2o

Lianas, delicious fruits, and a chimp's hand

The current site Lingering Shape in West Africa has two special features: extensive scenes of chimps savoring fruits and exciting footage of them crossing a flooded area swinging in lianas. Both features combined helped us to identify here one very special chimp.

We first paid attention to him when he crossed the flooded creek with a group of male chimps. Adult male chimps do not swing elegantly and dynamic on lianas as you might imagine. Their body size and weight urge them to be careful and slowly climb or walk on the unstable path. So, it surprised us that one of them carried something in his hand while crossing although he had rather difficulties keeping his balance. We only saw his dark back and part of an ear, so trying to match him seemed next to impossible.

Even while having a hard time to cross a flooded area, this chimp does not use his right hand for climbing (link to video)

Days later and later again, we found more videos of a dark male carrying something in his hand while walking alone or with others. As we had now seen in other videos with how much gusto the chimps fed on fruits, jokes starting around (“gourmand or gourmet?”) as he apparently always brought his own snacks. But after five or so different scenes, ascertainment that it is always his right hand kept curled in front him, and looking closely at this hand, we were wondering whether there was actually something in it. Most pictures were from quite a distance, but we could not see anything in his hand. What we could now say with the additional footage: there is a chimp with dark fur and a prominent brow ridge who is quite bald and walks always a bit hunched as he uses only one hand for knuckle-walking. We started a discussion thread “Adult male – the right hand issue” to talk about this. 

Always walking with his right hand carried in front of him (link to video)

We then remembered that we had earlier found a male chimp in the long feeding scenes that we described as somehow hunched. Our citizen scientist “Boleyn” had proposed the match based on two different scenes and named him Ebony for his very dark fur. The facial features like the prominent brow ridge fit “our” chimp very good. Reviewing all videos with Ebony, we saw that he also did not use his right hand for walking or standing up. At the time of the original matching we did not think about it much as he and other chimps were gathering fruits – picking them up with one hand, sniffing to determine ripeness, and collecting them in the other hand. That is what you expect of chimps feeding in a fruit “garden”. By looking closer into his right hand – and in striking comparison to a hand full of fruits of his buddy Rufus, we could now see that there was indeed nothing in his hand. Putting once a fruit in his right hand, we saw it rolling away. 

Ebony's damaged right hand is of no use for holding fruits (link to video)

In contrast to this, Rufus' hand is filled with delicious fruits (link to video)

We suspect that his right hand is somehow damaged, cannot really grab and support him while walking – or hanging in lianas. But then, this characteristic helped us to determine his identity.

We are not sure what happened to Ebony’s hand and whether it is a permanent injury or something he will recover from, but this special trait helped us at Chimp&See to identify this chimp. It was a great detective work of everyone involved.

We welcome you at Chimp&See! Come over to watch and try to help us match chimpanzees; if you find a match you can even name that chimp!

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!

Matching chimps on Chimp&See and happy surprises that make us check our assumptions!

Happy surprises and checking our assumptions!

When we try to figure out if we are seeing the same chimp in 2 different videos, we very often use secondary clues to figure out if we are looking at the same indivdual or not. For example, if a female is carrying a baby, we often assume that when we see her in other videos she will still be carrying that baby (this is because chimpanzees stay in close contact with their moms for the first 4 to 5 years of their lives). Our cameras are up at each field site for about 12-15 months so we do not expect big changes in growth or appearance, and we can always check the time/date stamp if we suspect something of that nature.

This is exactly how our intrepid citizen scientists figured out that indivduals we had identified as "Maggie" (a female) and "Ollie" (a female with a baby named "Chibi") were actually the same individual! Our amazing citizen scientist moderator "AnLand" started it all with this post: http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000k/discussions/DCP0000bax

In the end we went with calling this female Maggie-Ollie, just to make sure we cover all of our bases and to keep it simplest for downstream data analyses. Maggie-Ollie is identified by:

A female with a little cut in the right ear, undamaged left ear. Bald forehead. Whitish beard and eyebrows. Not very robust. Left eyebrow is slightly inclined. Deep wrinkles under the nose, round head and big mouth, and small ventral infant.

If you want to follow along here is the summary of the videos:

http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000k/discussions/DCP0000erf

Here is the original Ollie/Chibi discussion:

http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000k/discussions/DCP00009l3

and here is the original Maggie discussion:

http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000k/discussions/DCP000095w

If you have some extra time give it a go and join us at identifying unique chimpanzees! Hopefully you will find it fun to get to know the chimps and tell them apart too :)

Chimpanzee Matching

Our citizen science moderators have written some great posts about how to get started on matching and naming chimpanzees from different videos. 

• To get started, use this guide Chimp and See website Guide created by moderator 'jwidness'.

• If you want to go straight to trying to match chimps and giving them names, then check out this guide by moderator 'Quia' I've found a chimpanzee, now what do I do?

• If you need some help on telling chimps apart check out these discussions:
• Chip Description Criteria
• Chimpanzee Life Stages
• Identifying Gender