Update on the leopard mini-project

In July, Chimp&See re-launched the new project interface at Zooniverse with an upgrade of new workflows and remodeled discussion forums that facilitate exchange of the volunteers with the science team and among each other. At the same time, we re-launched the leopard mini-project that aims to assess the density of this important chimpanzee predator at all PanAf sites by identifying individual leopards.

The new interface enables us to have a dedicated discussion board for leopard videos and discuss questions related to leopards and other predators. Here the volunteers can post leopard videos they found during classification and discuss individual match proposals. Every video will be tagged by the volunteers with #leopard and the site name. We also ask for behavioral tags (like #marking, #resting, or #hunting), the sex, if seen, and to tag which sides of the body are visible in the video (front, back, left, or right). For discussing individual leopards in match proposals, it is important to compare the same side of the body for assessing the identity of the highly individually-specific pattern of spots and rosettes for any given leopard.

An example of a rather difficult perspective for identifying this gorgeous
leopard as the pattern is highly distorted. Original video here. 

In the first months of identifying leopards, we discovered that often for us the best perspective on the leopards from the Chimp&See video footage is the back view, when a leopard is walking away from the camera. The side views that many scientists use are, of course, even better, but rarely displayed in our footage and often distorted (see image above). Many cameras are set up facing animal trails, so when the leopard is walking slowly, we have the best chance to get a good look on the pattern found on the hind limbs and a reasonable number of images to confirm their identity. You can see here an example from “Tau”, a named male from the Quiet Wood site.

The images are stills from two videos captured on two separate days and different locations. Find more videos of Tau here.

The leopard video list and any information about the individuals seen are stored in the new open leopard spreadsheet. This spreadsheet, which we hope to automate partly in the future, replaces the old static known and prospective list for leopards. A storage solution for images of the identifying fur pattern will be added soon. The currently running Xenon Bloom site in West Africa already features beautiful leopards and we hope to name the first individual soon. You should ge involved.

If you want to discuss leopards and see how we identify individuals, please come over to Chimp&See, help us classify videos, and discuss with us!

#Matchmaking: this gal needs your help!

A few days ago our volunteer @daleh made their first post at chimpandsee talk. Even if they were not able to determine which chimp it was we loved this post because it showed that you, dear volunteers are trying!

The mystery of the lady was soon solved but alas! there is another female chimp in the same video sequence who gives us a hard time.

There are already some suggestions but we'd like to hear other opinions. Maybe you, yes YOU could jump in and help to identify her? We'd be thrilled to see other volunteers following @daleh's example and posting for the first time. Of course we're also excited about posts of our more routined citizen scientists! The more, the better! We're talking about the female further down not the first in the thread.

Now hop over to the discussion and tell us Who is this female?

You'll find all the female chimps to compare her with  in the prospective / known chimps list from Aged-Violet.

Thank you for being part of our chimpandsee-family!

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