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

Welcome to Mathematical Treefort!

Dear Chimp&See friends and family,

We are so happy to say that with all your help we were able to finish the massive Florid Postern site! With almost 130,000 video clips viewed and annotated! Thank you! The trottersID workflow is also completed and monkeysee is about 80% complete. We will keep that open for the weeks to come.

But in the meantime, we have opened a new site – Welcome to Mathematical Treefort – we are back to central Africa and we are deep in chimp AND gorilla territory! The chimps here are known to use tools for termite fishing so look out for tool use. There is also a low density of elephants at this site and it is a known primate hotspot, keep your eyes peeled for drills, mandrills and white-collared mangabeys!

If you want a break from species annotation we are still working on the last of chimp matching from Florid Postern and our Green Snowflake unique chimps mini-project is humming along in the Talk pages. We won’t start chimp matching yet at the new site, but feel free to comment under any interesting videos you find. You can use the #dailyzoo tag for any videos you love, to flag it for others to watch.

Thanks for being with us at Chimp&See and if you haven’t visited in a while, come back and have a peak at the new site!

Cheers, Mimi and the Chimp&See team