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
