I may have been the first person to see these chimps
I'm a lover of science you can do close to home, but thanks to sites like
Zooniverse, you can now do science very far away from home without taking your eyes away from your screen. For example, they have a program where you can pick through thousands of photos of the night sky and try to find
asteroids.
The latest program is one in which you can try to identify chimpanzees in Africa... and it's the best video game of the year.
Under the punnish title Chimp And See, they've taken thousands of short videos captured by dozens of trap cameras in the forest of Africa, and tossed them onto the web in a grand game of "what do you see?" Each time something moves near the cameras they take a little short 15-30 second video. On the site, you can review these videos and tell them what, if anything you can spot. Most of them are nothing, or pigs, or little deer-like things called duiker. Very often you see the people who set up the cameras, or branches disturbed by rain, or bats making a close pass at the infrared lights.
But you also see forest elephants and aardvarks and beautiful little antelope. And occasionally you also see chimps.
Come inside and see...
I've seen females walk past with an infant on board...
And I've seen adults give the camera a glare as they passed by...
I've even spotted one chimp that was new to the scientists at the sites, meaning that, should this chimp turn out to star in other videos, I get to "name" him. Which is just very cool, even if the chimp never knows it happened.
All the images and videos in this piece are ones that I found... but they're not nearly as good as some surfaced by others, which are just amazing. Go over. Start watching. It's relaxing. It's addictive. It's good for you and for science.
One person even spotted a mother-daughter pair who were ace tool users. They came right up to the camera, cleaned off a space, piled up nuts, grabbed a big stone, and started smashing away. Latter, the younger one tried it on her own. It's something you might think to find only in a nature documentary, only this time you might be the first to see it.