Happy Lunar New Year – The Year of the Ox!

Today starts the new lunar year – also called the Chinese New Year, but celebrated in many Asian countries. 2021 is the Year of the Ox and as every year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight the respective species – or a close African relative – from the Chimp&See cameratrap video footage. This year, it is of course the forest buffalo! 

African forest buffalos (Syncerus caffer nanus) are a subspecies of the African buffalo – smaller than the ones you see in the savannahs of South and East Africa, but still impressive in their build. Adults of both sexes have short C-shaped horns that point back. Coloration is dark reddish to brown with an even darker line down the spine and darker lower legs. The ears have adorable black and white fringes. 

In the past five years since we started with your help to analyze our video footage, we’ve seen forest buffalos relatively rarely. This all changed with starting the Twin Oaks (Loango, Gabon) site in collaboration with the Ozouga Loango Chimpanzee Project. The mixed landscape consisting of several habitat types varying from coastal lagoons, mangrove swamps, coastal forest, secondary and primary forest and open savannah seem to be ideally suited for this species. They can graze in the forest clearings and use the wetter habitats for wallowing to keep insects away. They usually have some help with the latter part from yellow-billed oxpeckers cleaning patiently their coats.

Two yellow-billed oxpeckers cleaning a forest buffalo's fur. Original video here.

Forest buffalos are seen at night and day. They sometimes discover our cameratrap and react to this in different ways. Please enjoy some video highlights from our forest buffalos, have some good Asian food of your choice, and a happy and prosperous new year!

 

The Best of the best in 2020

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 at Soaring 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).

Best of 2020 Poll - Vote now!

Reposted from the Chimp&See Talk discussion by Anja Landsmann (AnLand)

 Hi everybody!

Thanks again for your nominations for our Best of 2020! I had lots of fun watching and preparing the videos for the final poll of the Best-of videos! Now it’s time to vote for the Very Best of the Best!

Here is the poll: https://forms.gle/9hENRRBzbqF1CvRS6

Please choose your favorite video in each of the five categories and submit the choices. The videos are uploaded to youtube and can be watched directly in the survey document or on our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChimpandSee/

The poll ends on January 20th (next Wednesday) and we will post the results – the winner and a runner’s up for each category here and on our blog afterwards.

Thanks for having you here and helping enthusiastically with our project,

The Chimp&See team

Welcome to GreenToadstool!

 You, our absolutely incredible citizen scientists, got through the SoaringLeaf speciesID workflow SUPER FAST and before the end of the year!

...So...

We opened a new site: Welcome to GreenToadstool!

more here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2279/1756848

First Chimp&See Paper (and new PanAf paper): Chimpanzee Identification and Social Network Construction through an Online Citizen Science Platform

Our first ChimpandSee.org paper! 

We find that citizen scientists can reliably identify chimpanzees from camera trap videos. 

McCarthy MS, Stephens C, Dieguez P, Samuni L, Després-Einspenner ML, Harder B, Landsmann A, Lynn LK, Maldonado N, Ročkaiová Z, Widness J, Wittig RM, Boesch C, Kühl HS, Arandjelovic M (2020) Chimpanzee Identification and Social Network Construction through an Online Citizen Science Platform. Ecology and Evolution doi : 10.1002/ece3.7128

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.7128

Video abstract:

Abstract:

Citizen science has grown rapidly in popularity in recent years due to its potential to educate and engage the public while providing a means to address a myriad of scientific questions. However, the rise in popularity of citizen science has also been accompanied by concerns about the quality of data emerging from citizen science research projects. We assessed data quality in the online citizen scientist platform Chimp&See, which hosts camera trap videos of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and other species across Equatorial Africa. In particular, we compared detection and identification of individual chimpanzees by citizen scientists with that of experts with years of experience studying those chimpanzees. We found that citizen scientists typically detected the same number of individual chimpanzees as experts, but assigned far fewer identifications (IDs) to those individuals. Those IDs assigned, however, were nearly always in agreement with the IDs provided by experts. We applied the data sets of citizen scientists and experts by constructing social networks from each. We found that both social networks were relatively robust and shared a similar structure, as well as having positively correlated individual network positions. Our findings demonstrate that, although citizen scientists produced a smaller data set based on fewer confirmed IDs, the data strongly reflect expert classifications and can be used for meaningful assessments of group structure and dynamics. This approach expands opportunities for social research and conservation monitoring in great apes and many other individually identifiable species.

Visit us at ChimpandSee.org and participate in citizen science!

 

Another site is finished – Twin Oaks in the beautiful Loango National Park in Gabon

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!

New Dragonfly is finished – here the highlights!

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!