Around the Zooniverse: Chimp&See featuring our mod Laura K Lynn!

After a brief zooniverse site-wide outage last week - we are back!

A big thank you to Zooniverse for putting this great intro video together featuring our amazing moderator Laura ( @LauraKLynn ) , also featured is our incredible field site manager Heather Cohen ( @heathenchimp ) setting up a camera at the current Chimp&See site : Sunlit Ruins !
 

New PanAf Paper: Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees

We have a new PanAf paper out titled " Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees " in Science

You can read our press release HERE

Editor's Summary:

Adaptation to different environments can include responding to a myriad of pressures, from diseases to differences in water abundance. Of the great apes, chimpanzees are most similar to humans in that they inhabit a range of environments from savannahs to rainforests. Ostridge et al. sequenced exomes from 388 chimpanzees using fecal samples to investigate how selection has acted on these animals. Signatures of selection differed by environment, with forest-dwelling chimpanzee populations bearing variants in genes associated with disease resistance. This study demonstrates the utility of environmentally collected DNA in an endangered species and provides insights into adaptation in our closest living relative.

New Chimp&See paper : Highly precise community science annotations of video camera-trapped fauna in challenging environments.

 New Chimp&See paper out in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation: "Highly precise community science annotations of video camera-trapped fauna in challenging environments."  https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rse2.402

Even though they require more time for annotation as compared to stills, camera trap videos provide valuable acoustic and visual information on species behaviour and can improve identification of individuals. 

Using the Community Science (CS) platform Chimp&See (chimpandsee.org), we found that when comparing classification of 13,531 one-minute video clips done by a professional ecologist to those done by 1,744 Chimp&See community scientists, the overall, annotation precision was between 95.4% and 98.1%. Further, citizen scientists provide a wealth of additional information through additional annotations via hashtags in discussion boards. 

Our annotated video data set is already being used for AI algorithm training and our findings demonstrate the competence of community scientists with challenging videos, and hold great promise for future studies on animal behaviour and population monitoring. 

And a MASSIVE thank you and panthoot to our amazing mod @Eweforia (Carol) who made this incredible video abstract of our paper

Visit us at ChimpandSee.org today and contribute to research and conservation !

Chimp&See Tribute to Christophe Boesch

PanAf founder and co-director Christophe Boesch passed away suddenly on Sunday January 14th 2024

The PanAf was Christophe's legacy project, his great vision and he greatly supported our work on Chimp&See. He was a very great man and the world is a lot worse now that he is gone.

We even caught him on our PanAf/Chimp&See camera traps a few times at various sites:

Today at the MPI-EVA,I gave one of the speeches at his memorial tribute which mainly focused on his academic work. My friend and colleague Dr. Tobias Deschner, then focused on all the achievements of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation.

My text is posted below, but I would like to encourage you to follow the WCF on youtube, linkedin, facebook, instagram and on their website. It is my favourite NGO and they do amazing grass roots, evidence-based conservation work, and supporting them is the best way to honour Christophe's memory.

Dr. Inza Kone's tribute post to Christophe also showcases beautifully the impact this amazing man had in the conservation world and beyond.

--
(extracted from the MPI-EVA Tribute to Christoph Boesch. January 25th 2024. M. Arandjelovic)

I came to this institute with a passion for wildlife conservation, genetics and an obsession with gorillas. But over the last 20 years Christophe Boesch managed to convince me that chimps were pretty cool too.

Christophe was a pioneer. I can list a ton of firsts. With his wife Hedwige, they established the Tai Chimpanzee Project in 1979 and were the first to habituate chimpanzees without provisioning. This meant they just followed shadows in the forest, hoping for years that one day the chimps would just stop running away. Legend has it that this was because the chimps wouldn’t eat the bananas Christophe tried to give them. But be it intentional or reactive, Christophe and Hedwige kept at it for 5 years, trusting a process no one had tried before, a mix of confidence and hope, that it would work, with enough persistence.

Christophe’s Tai Chimpanzee Project revealed western chimps to be more gregarious than those that had been documented in the east and taught us about chimpanzee adoption by males, of unrelated orphan infants. He was the first to document cooperative hunting in chimpanzees. He is one of the founding fathers of animal culture and it's basis in social learning. He debated tirelessly across fields, advocating for species-specific, culturally-relevant and ecologically-appropriate testing in both human and primate cognition studies. Christophe is also the founding father of primate archaeology, bringing archaeologists to Tai to excavate a 4000 year old chimpanzee stone tool use site in 2001.

In 2005 Christophe started the Loango Ape Project in Central Africa, and as was the trend at several of the newer chimp research sites, the more we looked, the more chimpanzee behavioural diversity was found.

This inspired Christophe’s legacy project the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee which he started with Hjalmar Kuehl in 2010. The ambitious idea of creating short-term research sites, for as many chimpanzee groups as possible across their range, to better understand the behavioural repertoire of chimps and the evolutionary drivers of that diversity. Over 10 years, non-invasive data was collected from 18 countries and over 50 chimpanzee sites, and has already led to exciting revelations on the evolution of behavioural diversity. At the time, the PanAf project was thought of as unfeasible and over reaching, but thanks to Christophe’s vision and leadership, its already being replicated in other taxa.

Christophe often said he felt indebted to the chimps. and that the only way he felt he could repay that debt, was to ensure their protection.

He not only established the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation in 2000, but he also made sure his NGO would follow evidence-based ground-truthed practices. He supervised countless students whose research focus was improving conservation and biodiversity assessments, so that the basis of WCF recommendations and interventions would be to the highest scientific standards. This led to the birth of the A.P.E.S. database and eventually the A.P.E.S. wiki where all ape survey data is centralized and widely accessible.

I don’t want to just list his accomplishments though, I want you to know this man supported me and cheerleaded me, as he did for many others, and many other women in particular. He also understood the importance of nurturing chimpanzee range country scientists and did so enthusiastically. He supported them academically, but also encouraged them to take leadership roles in their home countries. So many students and researchers came through these MPI hallways from Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Rwanda, Gabon and more. This includes Christophe’s PhD student Dr. Simone Ban, the first woman to obtain her doctorate from the largest university in cote d'Ivoire in 2017.

Christophe valued a lot of things about people that don’t usually get valued in academia. He valued different view points, he liked to be challenged and to talk through difficult topics and he made us do the same, he brought us to the table. He didn’t mind if people felt passionately, feelings and topics were not scary or taboo, discussion was the way towards resolution.

When I joined the Max Planck, many moons ago, I had no field experience, I was a lab person and at that time, the two did not mix. But Christophe let me go to Tai anyway so that I could see the forest and the chimps. Specifically because he thought it would make me a better scientist. And it was indeed life changing. When he joined me in the forest a month after I had been there he was able to show me so much more than I had been seeing. I saw the forest through his eyes, i hadn’t been seeing the things I was looking at. His knowledge and passion were absolutely magical, and I am so very sad that I won’t get to be with that again.

During that trip, in a time before GPSs, he kept trying to teach me how to use my map and compass and find the trails at Tai. No matter how many times I screwed it up though, he was so encouraging when I succeeded. As if I had done it on the first try. I was also not the most agile primate ever to enter the Tai forest either, and there were a lot of snickers from the field assistants every time I tripped and fell to my face AGAIN on the forest floor . And I remember at some point in the afternoon, Christophe casually said to one of the assistants, but loud enough so that I could hear, “even though she falls a lot, she gets up really well”. And At the time, I mainly thought this was a kindness. a way to motivate me forward, to make sure I was still going to collect my data.

But now when I think about it, I think it was actually an overarching metaphor for how Christophe approached things and inspired people. Do your best, you may fail, try again, try again, don’t get discouraged, keep fighting, don't let the snickers of others keep you down, keep trying to figure it out. You will get there.

Christophe should still be here. He should be still fighting for the chimps. We need him, the chimps need him, the forests need him and I am absolutely ruined that he is gone. I only take solace in knowing how many people he inspired and that will carry on his amazing legacy.

Rest in Power Dear Christophe and thank you SO much for everything. Merci.

---

This video was made by/for the 2023 Indianapolis Prize for with Christophe was a finalist and showcases what an incredible force of nature he was.

Online Now! Chimp matching miniproject in collaboration with PantheraCats with photos from Niokolo Koba National Park!

 Let’s go! Our new chimp matching miniproject in collaboration with PantheraCats with photos from Niokolo Koba National Park is live! Join us and get into some chimp matching 🐵

Check it out at: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see-matching-miniproject-niokolo-koba/talk/5499/2670449

This project is hosted on its own chimp&see spin off site and will get updated as photos come in. This project will be a bit different than how we normally do things as it will be photos only, no videos, and the cameras are mostly set up to pick up the sides of animals, so we are in for a challenge! 

We're super excited about this new challenge and think its a great opportunity to get into chimp matching if you aren't already hooked :)

New chimp matching miniproject: Niokolo Koba National Park

We have a new chimp matching miniproject coming next week in collaboration with Panthera Cats with photos from Niokolo Koba National Park

read more about Panthera’s work here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/inside-the-race-to-save-west-africas-endangered-lions

We’ll start on November 21st and will post the link then!

Chimp&See in the Süddeutsche Zeitung

Our amazing scimod Nuria's kids, Laura and Nora, were interviewed  about chimpandsee.org ! Thanks girls for taking the time to talk about your time with us and to Süddeutsche Zeitung for featuring our project 🙂

(English translation:

"We support the project Chimp&See. For this you have to watch videos from African forests on a website. They come from cameras that react to movements. They make so many videos that the researchers can't analyze everything on their own. The cameras are already triggered when a branch shakes or a bird flies across the frame. On many videos, nothing can be seen, but sometimes you can see chimpanzees. Then you have to describe how many animals can be seen and what they are doing. Baby chimpanzees are especially cute. Or when you can watch an ape cracking a nut or using a stone as a tool." )

Full article HERE