Chimp&See March 2026 Newsletter

 

Dear Chimp&See-ers

The Chimp&See team has been working hard these last two months and we are officially DONE chimp matching at the Eternal Victory site. A big thank you to Heidi and Tonnie with special support from Heike as mods and the @team for getting through that site. If you want to see the whopping [82 identified chimpanzees from this site check out @Eweforia’s / Carol’s great poster

We are also happy to announce that we have added a new moderator to the team - we are so happy that Jenny / @Samburu has accepted the role and for all her incredible work on the #need_id videos! Welcome Jenny!

The mod team is now made up of: @Boleyn, @burdock, @Eweforia, @HeikeW, @Kikilee3, @lauraklynn, @luca-chimp, @tgcummings, @yshish & @Samburu

Thank you dear mods for all you do, from the flashy jobs up front to the behind the scenes work no one sees, you are the foundation of Chimp&See - thank you!!! 😀

We also now have Sally @sp515507 working hard on leading the bird song identifications! Are you a birder, or do you know one?Join us at the bird board and join our birding group to get into all the avian action at Chimp&See!

Cascading Arches chimp matching is now open! Visit us there if you want to work on your chimpanzee identification skills and have the chance to name a chimp!

We have just under 19,000 CA MonkeySee videos to get through - it's mostly baboons, so the videos are pretty easy to annotate - why not give five a try today! Otherwise see you at Crystal Gully SpeciesID and TrottersID or catch you on Talk. 😄  

Still want more C&S animal excitement? Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on  Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and/or Threads to get our best clip of the week featuring an interesting/amazing/oh-too-cute moment at C&S, like this chimp fishing for algae. Doesn’t he look like a pro?

Cheers,

Mimi & The Chimp&See team

Chimp&See February 2026 Newsletter

Dear Chimp&See-ers,

Time passes so quickly when you’re having fun! We hope you all have had a wonderful start to 2026!

Our last newsletter was in October, and since then a lot has happened:

• We finished the Eternal Victory site SpeciesID and TrottersID workflows (MonkeySee still needing classifications)

• We opened and closed the Cascasing Arches site SpeciesID (TrottersID for CA up now!)

• We opened a new site in January called Crystal Gully. This site is located in Gabon in a more savannah-y area, so lots of new things to see and discover - like the first lion seen in Gabon since the 90s! — so come join us at Crystal Gully SpeciesID next time you are online!

You may be wondering how we have been getting through sites so much faster than before, and that is thanks to the assistance of our AI platform Zamba!

Zamba is a machine learning algorithm the PanAf developed with DrivenData to automate species identification from camera trap videos, and it's all based on Chimp&See annotations!

Because even Zamba makes errors, we can’t use it by itself quite yet. But since it gets things right most of the time, we have been combining its answers with our Chimp&See community science annotations for the past few sites to reduce the number of viewers needed to retire a clip. You can read more about how we are doing that in Colleen’s post on Talk.

All this efficiency with SpeciesID has caused a bit of a backlog on MonkeySee, TrottersID, and chimp matching, and that is A-OK. We will take our time with those, BUT if you want to help, please join those side quests!

We also have noticed fewer tags since fewer people are viewing each video, so please feel free to tag as you classify when you are very sure of a species to try to bring the number up to past levels.

Wishing you all the very best for 2026, and see you at Chimp&See.org!

Cheers,

Mimi & the Chimp&See team🐵

 

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 :)