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!
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?
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!
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:
Log
into padlet (without logging in you won't be able to edit your pin later)
On
the left side under Community Scientists - click the + signs
On
the bottom right a window will pop up.
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!)
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!
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! 🙂
Thank you so much for all your hard work annotating videos at our new site, MathematicalTreefort! Feel like a change? There is a whole lot more to do at Chimp&See!
For one, there’s the hashtagging of videos you classified with the exact species or behavioural tags, which allows us a more thorough analysis of our data. Want to get started? Check out our hashtagging video tutorial
On top of species identification, another big goal of Chimp&See is to get precise population site estimates for each and every site. For this reason, we do chimp matching to figure out all the unique individuals we have seen (and seen again, and again and again…if we are lucky 😀). At the end of every site we determine the minimum number of males, females, juveniles and infants and from there use mathematical models to estimate the population size. During chimp matching, we also discuss the behaviours we see and any signs of disease, injuries or other hazards. This is all important data for the conservation of chimpanzees. Chimp Matching at MathematicalTreefort, or MT in short, starts on January 29th!
At MT we’re going even further! Among the animals we see are African Forest Elephants and Western Lowland Gorillas. Both species are classed as 'Critically Endangered' on the IUCN Red List. Therefore, it is of interest to determine the population size and different demographic parameters like sex, age class and group size for these species too. For this, we are going to need to identify individuals, and we like to invite everyone to contribute in the matching and hashtagging process. The following links lead you to the elephant matching board and the gorilla matching board on Chimp&SeeTalk.
So don’t hesitate, participate and try something new to help save endangered animals. Thank you so much for your contribution!
In the last months look at all we have accomplished:
Finished chimp matching at XenonBloom (bye bye algae fishing chimps...for now ;) )
Finished chimp matching at SoaringLeaf and our first chimp matching site truly run by a mod and it was a HUGE success - thank you wonderful Heidi/Boleyn!!!
Opened the new Cameroon-Nigeria chimpanzee site GlowingCloud
Started GORILLA matching at Green Toadstool - with an all new focus on silverbacks and groups thanks to the great ideas of, and lead by, our mod Anja/AnLand!
We did some housekeeping at New Dragonfly an identified all the unique chimps there - a big thank you to the scimods Paula/PauDG and Nuria/NuriaM for this big effort!
There has also been a huge effort at site clean up by our amazing team lead by Karen/Kikilee3 and Lucia/luca-chimp who are taking care of the videos with the need_id tags and wrong tags! Thank you ladies :)
We have a whole new set of "how to" videos curated by Carol/Eweforia HERE
We also have LOTS of new chimp matching tools including all the wonderful mug shots (including butt mug shots) curated by burdock/Libby and Carol/Eweforia
We just launched CHIMP matching at GreenToadstool which features some very exotic blond chimps and some clever honey collection with tools from a central chimp population
A blond chimp! get involved in chimp matching at GreenToadstool to find her again!
The three most often seen and recognized chimps (thanks to their unique features) even inspired an epic ballad by TheWeez15/Zaneb aka Sev : Our Leopard-Muzzled Grock
A big thank you and big pant hoots always to our awesome mod team especially Heike/HeikeW and Zuzi/yshish who are a massive support during these busy times! and as well to our tech support hero Colleen/sassydumbledore, you are THE BEST!
We are looking for new chimp matchers, check out THIS POST and sign up for the team calls :)
2020 has been a difficult year for many and it seems to us that Chimp&See – as other online citizen science projects as well – could provide a little bit of relief and entertainment amongst the turmoil in the world. We had a huge spike in classifications and new volunteers. We are grateful for all the help and support for our project. We love your interest in annotating our wildlife videos from all over Africa, especially the chimpanzees, and your questions while doing so. During the year, we worked on four sites that are in various stages of near-completion and a mini-project.
The science team also published the first Chimp&See paper in Ecology and Evolution that investigated how reliably volunteers at Chimp&See can identify individual chimpanzees from cameratrap footage only. For this, they compared the matching results of Chimp&See volunteers with chimp identifications by scientists from the same videos. The scientists knew those (habituated) chimpanzees from fieldwork. The results are promising: despite identifying fewer chimpanzees in the videos (only about 50% of the chimpanzees present ended up to be successfully matched to another chimp), the Chimp&See volunteers could reliably identify the members of this “test community”. That means, they identified (nearly) the same number of chimpanzees, but identified each chimp less often. The team created a great video abstract that you can watch here.
Before Christmas, we asked you about your “Best of 2020” – your biggest surprise, creepiest and funniest clips, the best camera reaction, and of course your favorite chimpanzee. We compiled all nominations, made poll, and here are the results from your votes:
Favorite chimp 2020: Freddy - or at Chimp&See called Loango-Freddy
The funniest video 2020: giant kingfisher vs. bird
The creepiest video 2020: his gait looks painful, but elephant Hawking is our hero!
The biggest surprise 2020: no comment needed ;-)
The best camera reaction: researchers having fun
If you missed the voting stage, but want to see all nominations – please check out the playlist on our youtube channel (and subscribe for more - we post every Wednesday!)
What will happen in 2021? Well, we have many more research sites coming, needing furthermore your help to annotate the videos to the species level in three workflows: ‘Species ID’, ‘MonkeySee’, and ‘Trotters ID’. Currently, the Central African site Green Toadstool is in the classification phase and chimp matching is starting atSoaring Leaf – a West African site – on January 25th. Check out the intro post, read the instructions, and become part of the team!
We will also move forward with the leopard and elephant mini-projects in 2021 and start gorilla identification, too.
Thanks to all who voted, nominated, classified, and tagged videos at Chimp&See! We hope to see you around furthermore this year. Please come over and discover the secret life of chimpanzees (and gorillas, and leopards, and all the other critters).
Last week, volunteers finished classifications in all three workflows for the Twin Oaks site in Gabon. This site was pretty special. First, it was just a beautiful forest landscape with many fancy birds, great elephant footage, and far more leopard sightings that we ever had at any site before. The elephant and leopard mini-projects are still gathering evidence for individual identifications to know more about the number and demographics of these species at Loango National Park, so get involved here, if that’s your passion.
The Chimp&See leopard mini-project aims to identify individual leopards by comparing their unique coat patterns.
Secondly, the site was pretty special in terms of chimpanzee sightings and discussions. The camera traps had been set up in collaboration with the Loango Chimpanzee Project, directed by Simone Pika and Tobias Deschner. The Loango Chimpanzee Project studies chimpanzee behavior and ecology in the Park since 2005 and habituated the Rekambo community that was also targeted by the Chimp&See camera traps. A recent finding of the project that made the news shows that chimpanzees crack tortoises open to eat them.
Because of this collaboration, we had the chance to discuss with a researcher, Alessandra Mascaro, and Chimp&See citizen-scientist moderator Heidi Pfund about individual chimps that Alessandra knows intimately from her fieldwork. That means, we did not really discuss possible matches, but rather perspectives and identifiable traits of known chimpanzees. This “reverse matching” resulted in a steep learning curve for everyone involved and provided some new matching perspectives, but also caveats, for other sites where we typically discuss unknown chimps from just the camera trap footage. Another interesting part of these discussions were known family relationships and life stories of the chimps, even if that meant to know that a certain individual died during or after the study period.
Finishing Twin Oaks doesn’t mean that we’ve run out of work. We started a two-months “chimp matching challenge” to finish the huge Xenon Bloom site. Become part of the team and help us identify all chimps and annotate the videos. We also opened a new site “Soaring Leaf” in West Africa, if you’re more drawn to the general “Species ID” workflow.
Get involved at chimpandsee.org and thanks a lot for all your help on behalf of the Chimp&See science team!
With the help of many volunteers, we finished classifications last week at our West African site “New Dragonfly”. We annotated not only all subjects in general Species ID workflow, but also identified all “trotters” (hoofed animals) and primates to the species level. Thanks to everyone involved for the great effort!
What did we find? On the species level, we've seen waterbucks for the first time, many bushbucks close to the camera, and burly giant forest hogs. A special highlight for many has been the rich footage of pangolins and aardvarks in the wild. We do see them rarely and New Dragonly offered some really close looks.
On the chimp side, we are not quite done with matching all individuals seen and you are still invited to help with chimp identification at New Dragonfly. We already identified some very special chimps, like wonderful Grace here with her infant, but would love some input in discussions about the juveniles and some special males. Easiest to get involved is by following the link above and read the pinned discussions that have open proposals (marked with **), watch the videos and chimps in question, and tell us what you think.
Grace with her yet unnamed infant discovering the camera. Her unique face helped with identification.
The chimps at New Dragonfly showed us plenty of tool use to collect ants with very fine sticks and delicate handling to avoid any biting, as well as honey extraction with long, sturdy sticks to gather honey from beehives in tree holes and underground nests. The tools are used here to open bee nests (e.g., by pounding) and to collect the honey. The chimp family in this video shows how it is done.
If you are not into chimp matching, Chimp&See has three workflows on a very special site at Gabon's Loango National Park - called Twin Oaks - open, where you can help annotate within the general Species ID workflow or specialize in primates or trotters identification. You can find the Loango Chimpanzee Project also on Twitter and Youtube.
If you aren't volunteering with us yet - please get involved and annotate African wildlife at Chimp&See!
We're out of data - for now! Panthoots and thanks to everyone who helped us finishing classifications on the most recent Green Snowflake site. Chimp matching is still ongoing for Green Snowflake and several other old sites like the memorable Restless Star site. The science team and the moderators will use the hiatus to clean up all finished Chimp&See sites. If you want to get involved shoot us a message.
A new site and many more along the way will start on a shiny new interface in early 2019.
If you want to get involved in the ongoing chimp matching or help us tag the classified monkey videos to the species level for our ongoing "Monkey See" project please visit our discussion pages on Talk. The mini-projects Animal Selfies and Leopard Identification will run in the background until the switch too. If you want to discuss something - the discussion boards are regularly checked and you will get a response!
Pictured here: our "drama queen" Petra from the Green Snowflake - a summary posting from the Green Snowflake site will follow soon!
Thank you so much and stay tuned for the next site on the new interface!
Chimp&See started three years ago on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2015. It’s our anniversary and like every year, we want to celebrate with some background information and a big THANK YOU to now almost 10,000 volunteers!
In the last three years, the project featured camera trap footage from 13 different research sites in three regions of the entire chimpanzee distribution, namely in Western, Central, and Eastern Africa. Missing until now is only Region B that is home of the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee subspecies (Pan troglodytes ellioti) and will be up on Chimp&See very soon! All temporary research sites are set up to study chimp communities that no researcher has studied (not even seen!) before or in collaboration with established long-term research sites. In the first case, an initial search for chimpanzee signs (e.g., nests, tools, vocalizations) is performed and when chimps are present, the cameras are set up and run for at least 12 months. In the case of a collaborative site, the infrastructure and local knowledge of the long-term project is used, but the field team aims for an unhabituated chimp community nearby.
At Chimp&See the research sites are then getting pseudonames, e.g., “Dry Lake”, to protect the animals, but also current and future researchers, from a potential interest of poachers and other dangers. The sites usually can only be identified to the region in the maps that display after each classification.
For this anniversary, we want for once break the rules and tell you exactly where we are. “Green Snowflake” is a collaborative research site in Kibale National Park in southwestern Uganda. Here the Pan-African program worked together with the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project Inc. to study a neighboring community to their main study group that is with more than 200 individual members the biggest known wild chimpanzee community.
The cameras had been installed in what was thought clearly outside their territory, but as it happened, the Ngogo chimps used a part of the study site, too. In addition, chimps routinely patrol the borders of their territory and venture outside when circumstances (that means here foremost: strength in numbers) allow. So unexpectedly, but luckily, we could get a glimpse at some Ngogo chimps when a big group of males, followed by field assistants, crossed in front of the cameras. Those, who are familiar with the Ngogo chimps, might even be able to identify some of them. This territorial aspect, the boundary patrols, and a partly violent path to enlarge their own territory – as well as several memorable individual Ngogo chimps – are also highlighted in last year’s documentary “Rise of the Warrior Apes” (Discovery Channel). If you get the opportunity, you should check it out!
But the majority of the Green Snowflake chimp videos show an unhabituated neighbor community of Ngogo – and it doesn’t mean that they are at the lower end of this territorial struggle! In fact, most chimp videos here show rather idyllic groupings for feeding, travelling, or play. What “our” community shares with the Ngogo chimps is a rather favorable environment of old and new forest mostly undisturbed by human activity (like logging). Although, we’ve seen them largely feeding on wood or clay as the cameras are terrestrial, the area has many mature fruiting trees and the chimps here also have an appetite for meat and hunt monkeys, with a preference for the cute red colobus monkeys. They also share, unfortunately, the dangers of snare injuries as we’ve seen in several individuals here.
If you’ve already seen Green Snowflake videos, you probably encountered the field team maintaining the cameras. Samuel Angedakin, was the PanAf field site manager responsible for setting up the “data collection zone” according to their field protocol. This included not only installing the camera traps for taking video footage (as seen now at Chimp&See), but also collecting other data and samples (plants and other environmental organic materials) to inform about ecological factors, as well as feces and hair samples for genetic analyses of chimp demographics. Sam is currently the field manager at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project Inc. and will start his PhD at Makerere University in Uganda in fall this year.
Sam Angedakin, the PanAf field site manager for "Green Snowflake"
So, if you want to watch “Ngogo’s Neighbors” at Green Snowflake and help us classify camtrap videos, come over to Chimp&See and check out the great chimp videos, already identified individuals, and all the other animals in the North of Kibale National Park, Uganda.
Many thanks to Carolyn Rowney and Kevin Langergraber, as well as Sam Angedakin, from the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project Inc. for their great collaboration. And as always, a million thanks to all volunteers for getting involved in video annotation and chimp matching as well as always asking great questions!
Bohr, Cassini, and Titan from Green Snowflake wish you a happy Earth Day 2018!
As you know, the Chimp and See project includes several different activities: classifying all video clips, tagging of specific species and behaviors, and matching of individual chimps (and in the last year, leopards). One of the comments we often hear from our newer volunteers is that they have trouble telling one chimp from another. It does take practice, but to help speed up the learning process, the moderator team at Chimp and See would like to announce a new video tutorial!
In, "How to Recognize Chimpanzee Faces," you'll learn a step-by-step technique that shows you what to look for and how to compare individuals to find a match. It's loosely based on a concept used by sketch artists and facial recognition software, and is simple enough for anyone to follow and put to use. We'd love to have more of you join us in chimp matching, so if you don't have the hang of it yet, or have been hesitant to try, take a look at the new tutorial:
(14 mins., English)
When you're ready, you can practice what you've learned with the chimps on our newest site, Green Snowflake! See you there!
A few days ago our volunteer @daleh made their first post at chimpandsee talk. Even if they were not able to determine which chimp it was we loved this post because it showed that you, dear volunteers are trying!
The mystery of the lady was soon solved but alas! there is another female chimp in the same video sequence who gives us a hard time.
There are already some suggestions but we'd like to hear other opinions. Maybe you, yes YOU could jump in and help to identify her? We'd be thrilled to see other volunteers following @daleh's example and posting for the first time. Of course we're also excited about posts of our more routined citizen scientists! The more, the better! We're talking about the female further down not the first in the thread.
Greetings! It's time for another matchmaking challenge, and this time, we go back to our very first site -- Quiet Wood 1! Let's see if you can help us match these chimps from way back in our early days:
First, we have a known adult female chimp, named Juno, along with her infant, Jay. Juno is a larger female, with sparse hair, lots of gray (especially on the back), and a square balding head. Jay is a medium-sized infant, still with the infant's white tuft of hair on the rear end, a face that is a bit orange in color, and very prominent round ears.
We also have another mother/infant pair at Quiet Wood who some people think might really be Juno and Jay. Here's where we could use a few more opinions. Take a look at the image below:
As you can see, this female has a similar build, similar coloration, and the infant also looks similar. But are they really the same? Look closely. What do you think?
Feel free to share your thoughts below, or you can help us sort out this and other matches on the discussion board at Chimp & See. Until next time -- happy matchmaking!
This week we like to get your opinion about a handsome male. And it's easy as a-b-c - literally!
He is a fully grown-up adult with mostly black hair. His eyebrows are rather straigt, the mask around the eyes is black and the muzzle slightly brighter. The ears stick out a little. There might be some baldness on his forehead but we don't know exactly the shape and size of it due to the lighting conditions.
Have a closer look at him in the videos on Chimp & See: clip 1clip2
In our discussion on talk we already ruled out the proposed match to Caruso. Now we have two possibilities left. The first one is Magnus and the second one is Baron. On purpose we don't give either of their descriptions here to not bias you. We'd like you to come up with your own opinion. The next two collages show the two males:
Here's our question: Do you think the male above is
a) Magnus b) Baron, or c) none of the two
Have you decided yet? Then please head over to the ongoing discussion on talk and tell us what you think. You can also just leave the respective letter a, b or c, if you prefer. We very much appreciate your participation!
Thank you and see you at Chimp & See where the brandnew site "Green Snowflake" is up and running!
This new post in our chimp matching series introduces a current proposal at Chimp & See, and asks you to help us decide if they match or not. This week, we're looking at some of the juveniles from the Dry Lake 11 site.
First, we have a young chimp known as DL11Juv15 (for the Dry Lake 11 site, the 15th juvenile found):
We believe this is a male chimp, and our volunteers have described him as a large juvenile with a long, overall dark face. We also see round ears that stick out on the side, and thin brows with a tiny bald spot at the hairline between them. We also see a bald patch in the hair on his left arm near the elbow, and on the left shoulder.
Now, here is another young chimp from Dry Lake (the one on the left):
He or she is similar in size to our DL11Juv15. Our volunteers describe him or her as having even face coloration, ears that stick out, a tiny bald spot in the middle of the brows, and a bald spot on the right shoulder.
Here are the full video clips of this chimp (it's the one that looks at the camera and then walks toward it): Clip 1, Clip 2
Finally, we have this juvenile from Dry Lake (the one on the left):
We don't see much, but our volunteers see a similar body size as the other two juveniles. S/he also appears to have bald spots on both shoulders, as well as a hairless right wrist. The only missing feature seems to be the bald spot above the brow.
Here is the full video clip of this chimp (again, the one who begins on the left and leaves around :04 seconds): Clip
This new posting in our chimpmatching series introduces a currently discussed match proposal at Chimp&See and invites you to review and get involved.
First up are two slightly overexposed videos of an adult female with an infant. We think, she might be Sita and her offspring Nini from the Cool Silence site. The colored footage is from the "known" chimp Sita.
Like Sita, this female is very bald, has a barrel-like upper body and skinny legs. The eye brows are arched, but not prominently protruded. The nostrils have a hawkish appearance that is reversed by a very rounded muzzle. Her rectangular face is irregularly colored with pinkish pigments around the eyes and at the upper part of the muzzle. These coloration differences can also be seen in the black-and-white footage.
Most notable are the irregular formed ears. They both stick out quite a bit. The left one is probably just a bit strangely grown; the right ear is seriously deformed (maybe even cut).
The roundish swelling is not much protruded.
What do you think? Could this be the same female?
Please keep in mind that these are camera trap videos from an unknown (unhabituated) chimpanzee population, so we don’t have the ultimate answer whether this is a match or not either!
If this posting got you interested in our matching discussions, please come over to the discussion forum and get involved.
The “Meet our chimps” mini-series closes with adult female Lesley and her infant daughter – whom we also want to name with you! Adult female Lesley is none of our most memorable and special chimps. She has a friendly face with a slightly reddish pigmentation, cute pointy ears, some balding, and a strong body. Although that’s not something very special for females with dependent offsprings, she seems to be a bit less gregarious (i.e., social) than other members of her group. She is more often seen alone with her infant or in smaller groups with just another adult, not in the big traveling or feeding parties. Her already big infant daughter makes the most of this situation, plays and investigates on her own whenever she gets the chance – and provided that mom is still close. This little girl is one of the few infants overall at Chimp&See that has been matched on her own due to a defining trait: the small scar or dent at her right eyebrow. Usually, we can only match the infants because we can identify their mothers. She is special in that regard and that’s why we wanted to present her here and use the opportunity to let use choose a name for this little girl!
To go with her mother’s name and our brief thoughts about sociality in this posting, we decided to go with another pop-culture theme, the great 90ies TV show “Friends”. So, growing up, do you think she will be perfectionist and bossy like Monica, eccentric like Phoebe, or always emotionally outpouring like Rachel? Please vote here! ***Update (April 26, 2017) ***
Welcome Phoebe! Thank you so much for helping
us again to settle for a name for another sweet little infant. Lesley’s
daughter will now get her final “ID” with this wonderful name. A clear majority
for Phoebe emerged already in early votings and could sustain its ranking
against a rising share for Rachel in the very last hours of this poll. Just
like her namesake from Friends, we hope she will be a great and tolerant friend,
a bit eccentric, and get the “forest smartness” to survive in her changing
environment.
If you
wonder, why we name our chimps, instead of just keeping coded IDs (like Phoebe’s
temporary ID: RSInf03), please read this wonderful blogpost by our
mod Kristeena Sigler. And if you want to get the chance to name a chimp yourself, visit our
discussion boards at Chimp&See and give chimp matching a go.
