Chimp&See October 2025 Newsletter

 Hi Chimp&See-ers,

Two exciting months have passed since our last newsletter!

First off, our incredible mod Carol @Eweforia with the support of our data manager Colleen @SassyDumbeldore has spearheaded an effort to start getting out Chimp&See data into iNaturalist! We are so thankful to them both for getting this off the ground! You can see all our observations as far at our iNaturalist Chimp&See page

It has always been our intention to provide all our observations of wildlife to iNaturalist but Carol has taken the reins here and started, focusing first on all of the animals we have observed outside the IUCN species ranges. She will continue working on this for the foreseeable future focusing on updating the vocalization database on iNaturalist and for us to try to provide at least 1 entry /species from each site in the weeks/months to come. Carol wrote a great post about her project here and is ready to answer your questions if you should have any.

We are also happy to report that our Eternal Victory site is almost done and we expect a new site to be up sometime in October! We still have all trotters and monkeys to get through for EV and still some trotters from our previous site Prismatic Expanse, so if you are into antelope, hogs or monkeys join us on those, please!

In the past 2 months we also completed Black Rock chimp matching AND Prismatic Expanse Chimp matching. That brings our total number of identified chimps to 861 named chimps + 182 chimps seen once but that are sure to be unique = 1043 individual chimps identified on Chimp&See! As always a huge thank you to Carol (@Eweforia) for making the posters, our incredible chimp mod team of Heidi (@Boleyn), Tonnie (@tgcummings) and Heike (@HeikeW), our Chimp&See @team of chimp matchers and anyone else who has helped us!

Eternal Victory chimp identification is still going strong - join us there!

Finally, we had some fun outreach in Germany over the past few months. Chimp&See was happy to participate in Leipzig’s Long Night of Science and in the Max Planck Society’s Open Science Ambassadors Annual Meeting

Thanks for being with us and see you at Chimp&See!

Mimi & the Chimp&See team :)

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