Chimp&See July 2026 Newsletter: New Site alert ! Welcome to Midnight Sun

🚨 New Site alert ! 🚨

On June 16th Crystal Gully  was completed and we have now opened Midnight Shell! 

We are back in the range of Eastern chimps (P.t. schweinfurthii) in the mountains of Nyungwe National Park. The habitat is dense, and higher altitude with some unique species, some of which we may have seen at our other Rwandan site Black Rock (Gishwati). This site is small but jam packed full of chimps, so get online now to ChimpandSee.org before it's gone!

Crystal Gully (CG) was an incredible site where we saw a lion, the webs of social funnel-web spiders,

and new suspected hybrid duikers . We also spotted incredibly rare Central African pottos — and not only that, they were chasing each other (normally super slow), in a pair (normally solitary), and on the ground (normally arboreal). 🤯 - check it out here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/subjects/68782225

That meant, lots of new tags for this site, and lots of new discoveries! It was really a pleasure being in the unique mixed habitat of the Bateke plateau, eastern Gabon! 

In case you haven’t been around, the trotter videos from CG are still up in the trottersID workflow and the primate videos from CG will be up soon, so you still have a chance to see this beautiful site! …and if you love baboons, there are 1000s of algae eating, swimming and jumping baboon videos still up from Cascading Arches in the MonkeySee workflow ;) those are really easy to do !

We leave you this month, with our beautiful lion video from Bateke / Crystal Gully (this lion was the first one seen in Gabon in 20 years and has kicked off a big conservation effort to bring back the species to Gabon!):  https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/subjects/68714937

Cheers,

Mimi & the Chimp&See team 🐵

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🐵