We celebrate 10 years of Chimp&See!

Dear Chimp&See-ers

10 years! It’s been 10 years since we started Chimp&See on April 22nd, 2015! Time has flown…

…and we have accomplished A LOT!

We have annotated over 330,000 1- minute long videos! Identified more than 990 chimpanzee individuals from 26 field sites across 13 African countries. While also doing 3 mini projects identifying even more chimps at other sites to story research and conversation! We started all sorts of incredible spin off projects like identifying gorillas, elephants, leopards and other unique animals, as well as helping researchers better document camera reactions and disease prevalence at our sites too! We will post more on our accomplishments in an anniversary post on Talk.   

Just in time for our anniversary we have also opened a new site: Prismatic Expanse! It is a very remote site in the north central part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We can’t wait to see what we find there! Read more about it in the Welcome to Prismatic Expanse post!

To celebrate, we invite you all also to join our Chimp&See Map - leave us a pin and show us where you are from. It can be as precise as your street or as imprecise as your country), we’d love to know where you are all from and for you to tell us a bit about yourself!

To add your pin, follow these instructions:

1. Log into padlet (without logging in you won't be able to edit your pin later)
2. On the left side under Community Scientists - click the + signs
3. On the bottom right a window will pop up.
4. You can put in your location, or choose “skip for now” (you will have a chance to change this in the next step, so don’t worry!)
5. Then fill in your information as follows 🙂
6. You can edit anything in your pin by clicking on your pin, then clicking on those 3 dots in the top right corner of your post and selecting “edit”. For example, you can move the pin location to where you feel is best and if it's to a place without an address (like a forest) you will get the pin's new geographic coordinates (in numbers).

You can also use the map to explore where our field sites have been and see where our international team of collaborators are located!

I also want to take this chance to give a HUGE MASSIVE THANK YOU FILLED WITH PANT HOOTS to the current moderator team! Chimp&See would be nothing with them and their hard work: @Boleyn - Heidi, @burdock - Libby, @Eweforia - Carol, @HeikeW - Heike, @Kikilee3 - Karen, @lauraklynn - Laura, @luca-chimp - Lucia, @tgcummings - Tonnie & @yshish – Zuzi 
And last but not least, our incredible tech support and data manager Colleen, the original @SassyDumbledore ❤

I couldn't do it without you, thank you for all these amazing years of support!

And of course the biggest thank you and the most pant hoots to YOU! our Chimp&See community scientists, if you started with us and left or just recently joined us, and anyone in between, thank you for being part of the Chimp&See family and contributing to science and conservation with your time and your joy. Thank you, Merci, Asante Sana, Daalụ, Obrigado, Gracias, Danke, Děkuji, Mauruuru koe, Grazie, Hvala, Xièxiè, Tack, Arigatō…and many many more!

Mimi and the Chimp&See team

PS: If you want to see more of our Anniversary Activities and Celebrations check out our post on Talk!

More Good News about Chimp Matching

Hi Chimp&See-ers,

We have had an exciting few months since our last newsletter in August of 2024.

The August Chimp&See challenge was a huge success - thank you to everyone who participated and accomplished a total of 27,291 classifications in the challenge alone and helped us wrap up the Mathematical Treefort (MT) site!

We also managed to wrap up the MT Chimp matching naming 49 chimps (seen in multiple videos) and identifying an additional 6 unique chimps (only seen once) for a whopping total of 55 chimps at that site!

We also are just about done chimp matching at the Sunlit Ruins site - where we have named 12 chimps, and identified 3 unique chimps for a total of 15 chimps so far!

The PanAf (the umbrella project of Chimp&See) also published a new paper in the journal Science in January on detecting local adaptation in chimpanzee populations across their range. We found that chimps have different adaptations depending on if they live in more forested or more woodland-type habitats. You can read our press release about it here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/jan/chimpanzees-are-genetically-adapted-local-habitats-and-infections-such-malaria

In late February, we opened a new small site - we call it Black Rock, but you can find out more about under the name our collaborators use: The Gishwati Research Station in Rwanda (LINK: https://gishwatiresearchstation.org/) - this site is full of chimps but we have very few videos overall so it ran in parallel with the Sunlit Ruins site (which has very few chimps, in fact we think we have identified them all already, but a lot of videos still remain). By the time this newsletter reaches you, the speciesID at Black Rock will be done and the monkeySee may be too, but there are still LOTS of chimps to match from there, so join us!

April 22nd 2025 will be Chimp&See’s 10th Anniversary and we are starting to plan something special for that, so stay tuned and we hope to see you at ChimpandSee.org soon! 🙂

Mimi & the Chimp&See team

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.