We've partnered with Driven Data and the ARCUS foundation to offer a new €20,000 challengethat takes data scientists deep into the jungles of Africa. Camera traps are useful for non-invasive observation of wildlife and have the potential to free up huge amounts of research time -- but they can't yet automatically flag and label the species they observe.
In this project, a global community has annotated videos through the Chimp&SeeZooniverse project, and now its time for the data scientist community to turn those labels into algorithms! You'll find here one of the largest labeled camera trap datasets for you to practice your skills and help researchers delve into the secrets of life on Earth!
Utilizing both crowdsourced labels as well as crowdsourced algorithms, this ambitious computer vision competition is in a league of its own. The winning techniques developed here will provide a starting point for production-level automated species tagging for use in camera trap systems around the world. By decreasing the time that experts spend watching empty footage, we can improve their ability to focus on the outcomes that matter most.
On Chimp&See people from around the world have been recording what they see in each video but they also carry out more complex tasks such as identifying unique chimpanzee individuals and tagging primates and other animals to the species level. With this competition we hope to use machine learning to accomplish the first task more time efficiently thereby allowing citizen scientists to focus on the more complex tasks of the project!
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!
Aged Violet has been the largest research site we’ve worked on so far – and we finally finished it a few days ago! Thanks to everyone who was involved in the classification of nearly 100,000 clips and with chimp matching!
A review blogpost of this site needs to start with its most discussed feature – the very many duiker videos. Those small to medium-sized antelope- or deer-like herbivores (small grey duikers aka Maxwell’s duikers, as well as the red ones: Brooke’s and Bay duikers) have been just everywhere. Even very patient and enthusiastic long-term volunteers spoke about that we should re-name the project to “DuikerWatch” as there were so many videos of them. Sometimes the duikers reacted to the camera and stretched their necks very long to see (but mostly sniff) what might be there. They are usually getting along very good with the monkey species and forage together on the forest floor.
Only three of many duikers we've seen at Aged Violet
Aged Violet also presented us the best footage of leopards of all sites. We were able to watch powerful big males on prowl in bright daylight – allowing us to identify them on the individual level in the leopard matching project. We’ve seen at least two leopard moms with a cub and a first for us – a leopard female with prey after a successful hunt. We will work furthermore on these videos in the leopard mini-project.
But the highlight of this site – well, of every site – have been the chimpanzees, of course. The Aged Violet chimp community is not very big, but has some members that were at the same time easily recognizable and outstanding as individuals.
There is Filou – an older male with torn ears and scars on the back, who adopted and carries around a male infant we named Marlyn, and is seen often with his “kindergarten”: Marlyn; Kamala, another small juvenile that accompanies them almost permanently; and Sabirah, a young adolescent female is often around, too.
On the other hand, Jojo-Crann, an adolescent male, spends most of his time closely following his mom Makena who cares for a young infant. Makena’s slim figure, gray back and a damaged right ear made her easily recognizable to us. In addition, she does not like carrying her infant girl ventrally and swoops her on her back, when the little one managed to get on her belly in frightening situations, like when Makena crosses a small river.
Another individual to remember is smiling Lya. She is a young female with an enormous swelling that should be very attractive to the males here. Her broad face, the coloration of it and the form of the muzzle let her look like as if broadly smiling all the time.
We could observe the Aged Violet chimps in big traveling parties, skillful cracking nuts, and just relaxing and playing. We still have a number of open matching discussions at Aged Violet and did not name all the cute chimp infants, so your help is still wanted and maybe you get the chance to name a chimpanzee!
The project is, of course not finished with this site! Recently, we opened a new site in Eastern Africa – Green Snowflake – with new chimps and great footage of red colobus monkeys.
Jump over to Chimp&See to help us classify African wildlife and try your hand at chimp matching!
Hi everyone!
I’d like to take a moment to update you about the animal selfies project.
First of all, I want to thank you all for assisting me with this project by finding and tagging all camera reactions. It is a tremendous help to not only annotate the camera reactions in the classification step, but also tagging them here on Talk to allow discussions about the videos and to build tag group collections. Volunteers have already tagged almost 200 elephant camera reactions from all sites, 42 camera reactions of gorillas, more than 800 camera reactions from chimps, and many more curious baboons. This is amazing!!! We now have a solid and ever growing database for looking at how wild animals respond to camera-traps.
As new volunteers are joining the project all the time and others might have forgotten, I want to take the opportunity to remind everyone on the purpose of this project and how you can help. I am looking into the camera reactions of chimps and gorillas (foremost) and of baboons and elephants (secondarily). I am investigating behavioral differences towards the cameras on the individual level and across different communities and sites, as well as species. The baboon and elephant data will be coded and analyzed in a second step since it is necessary to identify elephants and baboons individually (or at least to the group level) as we do it here at Chimp&See with chimps and gorillas. At the moment, this is not possible – so the apes have priority – but this will hopefully be accomplished later. Therefore, tags and videos from more sites here at Chimp&See with those four species can always be incorporated in future studies.
I am specifically asking for your help to tag all camera reactions of these species (chimps, gorillas, baboons, and elephants) with #camera_reaction or #selfie, and to add #camtouch, if the camera is touched. An important step in this process is to also make sure that the species #chimp, #gorilla, #baboon, #elephant, and the site name, e.g., #GreenSnowflake, is tagged too.
Thank you again for all your help! If you have any questions, please ask them here!
We are very proud to announce that our collaborator Paul Tehoda won the best poster prize at the Inaugural Congress of the African Primatological Society - APS in Bingerville, Ivory Coast last month!
His work "Photographic Records Of Ghana’s Elusive Chimpanzee And Its Conservation Status" was made possible thanks to the collaboration between the PanAf and the research group of Dr. Emmanuel Danquah at the Department of Wildlife and Range Management and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana :)
Elephants have complex ways of communicating with each other that involve olfactory, visual, tactile and auditory signals.
They are highly social mammals that live in very complex societies. In this sense, the acoustic communication plays an essential role in locating individuals and maintaining intra- and inter-group cohesion.
The elephant society is a fission-fusion model where individuals aggregate and dissociate based on ecological stressors and other factors such as predator pressures, calf care, and mate selection. As explained in “#ElephantTuesdays: oh mama! a female´s role, the core unit of the elephant social structure is the family unit which consists of an adult female and her offspring. Family units that are found to be highly associated are bond groups. To maintain cohesion and coordination of the family group and association with bond groups, numerous tactile and visual communication cues are used along with a complex system of auditory signals.
Elephants produce a broad range of higher frequency sounds like barks, roars, cries and snorts. But
the most frequently used sounds they produce are the “rumbles”. Rumbles are very low frequency sounds that were originally thought to be originated in the elephant´s stomach (stomach rumbles). These low frequency sounds can reach up to 2 kilometers (Langbauer et al. 1991, McComb et al. 2003) and are used for communication between and within family herds over large distances.
If we compare the range of frequencies used by elephants with those used by humans, we can get an idea of how amazingly low these rumble frequencies can be: a typical human´s voice in speech is about 110 Hz for men, 220 Hz for women and 300 Hz for children, while a typical male rumble is about 12, a female´s rumble is about 13Hz and a calf´s 22Hz.
It is known that the frequency of the sound is correlated to the level of excitement of the elephant; they produce low frequency sounds when they are in a low level of excitement. These sounds are used to promote group cohesion. In contrast, high frequency sounds are present when the elephants are highly excited.
They are not only great at producing sounds, but also at localizing them: it has been suggested that the larger the space between an elephant´s ears (inter-aural space), the better the ability at localizing sounds, so they extend their ears perpendicularly to their heads in order to localize sounds.
When an elephant rumbles, a replica of the airborne sound is also transmitted through the ground. Seismic communication could supplement airborne communication or be especially beneficial when airborne conditions are not ideal for transmission. (O'Connell-Rodwell, C.E. 2007. Keeping an "ear" to the ground: Seismic communication in elephants. Physiology 22:287-294.).
Elephants also use other senses to communicate, like their vision. Here we talk about visual communication: if you watch an elephant for a long while, you will see a large repertoire of visual signals that they perform to communicate with one another (or with other species) by using their heads, eyes, mouth, ears, trunk, tail, feet and their whole body. So, if you happen to be in front of an elephant and s/he starts run to you, head up high above his/her shoulders, spread ears, you´d better run fast if you have the chance, or start your car and speed up! S/he is telling you that you are not welcomed; it´s a threatening or dominant signal. A subordinate elephant carries his/her head low and his/her ears back. A socially excited elephant rapidly flaps his/her ears, eyes open. A frightened or excited one raises his/her tail and chin, remember?
You all might remember the blog post about the “elephant trunk”, talking about the elephant´s trunk abilities. They are very tactile animals that touch each other with their entire body to communicate in several contexts like defensive, sexual, playful behaviors etc.
But the trunk is the part of their body with which they more often touch each other to communicate. Remember this video? a beautiful example of tactile communication:
They also use chemical signals to communicate. Trunks up to sniff the air, exploring the ground for urine trails etc., sniffing genitals, mouths, glands or ears of partners…chemical communication gives an efficient long-lasting signal.
Berg, J.K. 1983. Vocalizations and associated behaviours of the African elephant Loxodonta africana in captivity.
Elephant Voices: https://www.elephantvoices.org/
When you have a job and two small kids,
talking about spare time is often very optimistic. But somehow, Ingo and I
manage to find some activities that we can share with our kids and that really
make our day.
Although on chimpandsee we always are
studying chimps in the wild, we also are involved with captive chimps
sometimes, taking great care for their welfare when they are housed in zoos and sanctuaries. If it
was somehow possible, believe me, I myself would open each and every gate to release the animals. But I´m not intending to start a
debate about zoos here; as sad as it often feels, zoos do exist and we need to
care.
So, years ago Ingo and I founded an association
devoted to animal protection called Kalinga. One of the many goals of
Kalinga is to lend a helping hand to the zoos that might need and want it
(usually those in the developing countries).
We work mainly, but not exclusively, with
elephants in things related to enrichment, foot care, protected contact (PC),
improvement of infrastructures, and more general things like environmental
education.
For our latest project we didn´t have to travel too far, as it took place here in
Germany, in Baden-Württemberg, in a small zoo called Leintalzoo. This zoo is
run by an experienced family, and holds the biggest harmonious group of chimps in
Germany (33 individuals). The chimps
installation might be shocking at first, especially because we are nowadays used
to seeing those big zoos where the animals are kept in islands surrounded by water, so you
basically see no barrier, which gives you the feeling of "freedom". But actually, there is a barrier: the water. So, all
the space that the water occupies is lost space for the animals. But humans see
no gates.
In the Leintalzoo you do see barriers, big
iron cages to be more specific. This is really shocking, but put it this
way: chimps can move in all three dimensions. They not only can walk, but they
can also climb. In fact, the chimps in this zoo have amazing muscles!
Anyway, the chimps enclosure was too empty
and boring for our taste. We had to do something!. It wasn´t clear to us if the owners were going to be very happy if we barged in, but after offering our help, they gave us green-light to go ahead :-) .
We got some fire hoses from the Böblingen
Fire Department and we used them to build and hang lianas and hammocks. This is
what happened:
this is what the chimps installation looked like:
Getting started: hanging lianas:
Next step: the hammocks:
And the very best part of all: the chimps reaction:
There´s still soooooo much to do, but we are moving in the right direction.
