Citizen Science Conference
Meredith giving a project slam Photo: Avi Baruch
Meredith has been busy this past week attending the Citizen Science conference in St Paul, Minnesota. She reports back that it was a fantastically stimulating conference that confirms the high esteem that citizen science has grown within the science community.
The yearly conference sees a diverse group of people from researchers, educators and universities to the likes of NGO’s and museums get together to discuss the use and promotion of citizen science. Although we at Snapshot Serengeti have been aware of its great impact for some time citizen science is now emerging and is recognised as a powerful tool in the advancement of research by many.
Those attending the four day event collaborated by sharing their varied experience and ideas on a variety of topics. The collection and sharing of data and how to impact policy was discussed. There was focus on how to use citizen science as an engaging teaching tool, how to bring citizen science to a wider audience and how to involve citizens more in research. Those attending brought their joint experience and expertise together to discuss how citizen science impact on science could be measured and evaluated. If you want to find out more about the conference then visit this link.
http://citizenscience.org/association/conferences/citsci2017/
We sometimes forget when working away at classifying our stunning images on Snapshot Serengeti that there is a lot of tech going on that enables us citizen scientists to be of use to the scientists. Meredith gave what’s known as a ‘project slam’ essentially a 5 minute presentation about our work on Snapshot Serengeti and how it has paved the way for helping other cameratrap citizen science projects. A quick look around Zooniverse will show just how many there are now.
The massive amount of data produced over several seasons through Snapshot Serengeti have allowed the development of a robust, tried and tested methodology that smaller projects would have taken years longer to develop. Just contemplate the work that went into developing interfaces, protocols, pipelines and algorithms for taking millions of classifications of untrained volunteers and turning them into a dataset which has been verified to be >97% accurate.
It is awesome to see that something we all find so truly engaging can translate into such serious stuff in the field of science. I think we, the citizen scientists, and the Snapshot team can be rightly proud of our work on this brand new branch of science
A Green Desert
I have to admit that I actually quite like insects, they fascinate me, they are often brilliantly coloured and despite being so small seem to send most humans into a frenzy of panic. It astonishes me that these tiny creatures can come in such an array of beauty; something about the miniature form is beguiling. How can so much colour and pattern fit on such a small form.
However there are insects that do not elicit these feelings of wonder. Mosquitoes for one and ticks; both are annoying and can have you in your sick bed. If you have ever been hounded by sweat bees that want to crawl into every corner of your scalp, eyes, nose, ears and mouth you will know what I am talking about when I say they are enough to make you want to dive into a shark infested pool.
But… there is one creature that for me is worse than any of these, one that I cannot tolerate either mentally or physically. The tsetse fly.
My first encounter with tsetse in Central Africa has left me somewhat traumatised. I set off from base camp on a 2hr drive to an old abandoned camp to scavenge some equipment. The car had seen better days and although it had a windscreen it did not have windows. Lovely I thought, it’s hot and it will be nice and airy. The roads were in a bad state, necessitating a top speed of around 30km/hr. The first few km’s were fine then something sharp bit my ankle. Following that the same burning sensation came from my neck then there it was again from my shin instantaneously reappearing, most painfully of all on my temple. I looked around the dash board and it was swarming with about 50 tsetses all of which were clamouring to get to my bare skin and feast on me. They had been sucked through the nonexistent windows and there was nothing I could do to keep them out. All I could do was hold my collar closed whilst driving one handed the rest of the way. By the time I arrived I had welts all over my hands, neck, legs and feet. Yes they had actually crawled into my socks to get at my nice hot blood filled feet. Aarrrrrhhh.
Discomfort aside there is a very real risk to tsetse. They are vectors for a debilitating disease, sleeping sickness medically known as trypanosomosis. The disease effects both wild and domestic animals and humans. Whilst wild animals have a tolerance to the disease cattle do not. 3 million are thought to die a year across sub-Saharan Africa. Sleeping sickness in humans is often fatal if not treated although the death rate has been vastly reduced with modern medicines.
Historically areas of intense tsetse fly activity were not cultivated by humans leaving large fertile areas of the African continent as so called green deserts. Although a terrible burden for the human population it was good news for wild animals. The area of Central African Republic where I worked was one such place. It should have been teaming with wildlife but it wasn’t. In fact it was full of cattle during the dry season. The cattle herders are arriving in ever increasing numbers from Sudan trying to find respite from the desertification of their own lands. So how can this be? How can they survive the obvious tsetse infestation? It is all down drugs and motivation. The cattle must be shot full of drugs in order to survive the tsetse. A lot of these drugs are supplied by aid agencies trying to stop the human crisis developing but this inadvertently turns into a wildlife crisis. Not only do the herders now spend 4 months a year with their cattle competing alongside wildlife for resources but the herders are decimating the wildlife through poaching. They kill as much as they can, drying it to take back to Sudan and sell. It has become a major trade route and next to the armed gangs who extort protection from the families of herders the next richest guys working the route are the medicine sellers. Without the medicine the cattle die and the whole thing collapses.
Depressing I know but it does put the tsetse in context. Perhaps they played a very important role limiting the use of fertile land by over consumptive mammals. Once I learned their role in keeping humans out of wilderness areas I was a little more forgiving of their painful bites. Though when you have hundreds of bites all over you there is always that niggling worry of illness. Thankfully I escaped with nothing more than some ugly, very itchy swellings and a new understanding of the complexities involved with wildlife conservation.
Found amongst poached animal meat and skins, medicine for cattle.
Snapshots From The Past
This weeks guest blog is from our moderator David Bygott who has been guiding us through Snapshot Serengeti images since the beginning.
I’ve been lurking here for years as a moderator, but Lucy Hughes invited me to come out of the shadows and tell you how I got my Serengeti creds.
As a country boy in England I was obsessed with nature and yearned to see more of the world’s wildlife. Reading “Serengeti Shall Not Die” by Bernard Grzimek, inspired me to go there. The dream took some years to achieve. First, I worked hard to get a zoology degree. Then, I wrote to anybody doing field research in Africa who might need a research student, assistant, or slave. I got lucky. A scientist, studying hyenas and wild dogs in Ngorongoro Conservation area, wanted me to work on her better-known chimpanzee project, which I had been following in the pages of ‘National Geographic’. Sounded good.
Thus in 1969 I pitched up at the camp of my new bosses, on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. Ten days of getting to know Jane Goodall and her photographer husband Hugo van Lawick, and total immersion in African wildlife. Incredible nights of watching hyena packs run down wildebeest and tear them apart. Even a road trip into the heart of Serengeti.
A seed sown, my mind blown, I continued across Tanzania to the remote chimp camp at Gombe National Park on the beautiful forested shore of Lake Tanganyika. Here I spent 2 amazing years with a small team of young people, following the famous chimps through the forest and recording their behavior. Experiencing at first hand our closest kin was a life-changing experience for me.
David with a chimp group at Gombe, 1970
While at Gombe, I met more of my scientific heroes. Bernard Grzimek visited, so did Dian Fossey, and I travelled to Rwanda to see her gorillas. Jane’s doctoral advisor Robert Hinde came, and encouraged me to write up my fieldwork for a Cambridge PhD.
Two unexpected things happened at Cambridge. I met my wife, primatologist Jeannette Hanby. And we got to know Brian Bertram who had studied Serengeti lions for 4 years, following George Schaller’s pioneering work. Brian persuaded us that social carnivores were just as interesting as primates, and that there was still more to learn about lions. It was a change of direction, but we were tempted!
So in 1974 we joined the Serengeti Research Institute as lion biologists, thanks to support from the U of Cambridge. Our main mission was to census the lion population, as National Parks feared that lions were decreasing (they weren’t!). We also compared the lives of lions in different habitats (Serengeti Plains where prey abundance is seasonal, and Ngorongoro Crater where prey is always abundant). And we investigated lion pride dynamics – why do some individuals leave, and others stay?
Imagine being part of a community of scientists studying every aspect of the ecosystem. We had a house in the centre of Serengeti and a Land-rover to go wherever we wanted, and we spent our days and nights with the great tawny cats.
Sometimes humans and lions are attracted to the same campsites
It was remote, but fortunately we were both used to that. Every month we made a supply run – either to Arusha or Nairobi, each at least 200 miles away, mostly on dirt roads. This took 2 days each way, plus several days of shopping and socializing. We learnt a lot about fixing cars, often in beautiful remote settings with primitive tools.
There was much less technology then. We had basic maps but no GPS, radio or mobile phones or internet. There were no computers, though we had cutting-edge hand-calculators. Radio-telemetry was in its infancy; we built our own radio-collars and darted and collared a few lions, but for most of our study we had no air support and ground-to-ground range was poor, so we had to rely on careful searching to find the lions – scanning with binoculars, driving, staying out at night to listen for roars. We identified the lions from natural markings and close-up photographs, on film of course. We developed a symbiosis with cheetah biologists, George and Lory Frame, photographing each others’ study animals whenever we saw them and trading ID photos to increase our sightings. We learnt as much as we could about what all our colleagues were doing, and often participated in ecosystem-wide aerial animal censuses.
We tried various methods of counting lions, including aerial and ground transects and individual recognition. The latter proved the most successful, but it was hard work to identify all the lions in our 1000 square study area. In addition, every second month we’d spend a week in Ngorongoro Crater. After finding as many lions as we could there, we would follow one pride for 4 days and nights, to observe their activity, range and hunting success. We did the same with a comparable pride living at Sametu on the Serengeti Plain. The story of the Sametu pride unrolled like a soap opera, and we couldn’t resist writing a book about them. “Lions Share” tells their story, but also incorporates much of what we knew about lion behavior and about the ecology of Serengeti. (Out of print, but look on Amazon).
Eventually we had to leave, and our friends Craig Packer and Anne Pusey took over the Serengeti Lion Project. Craig amazingly kept it going from 1978 to 2014, and Snapshot Serengeti is an offshoot of what has become one of the world’s longest running wildlife studies.
After writing up our 4 years of lion data, we returned to Tanzania in 1982 to work in conservation education; university teaching, producing guidebooks and interpretive displays, and guiding safaris. We built our home near Lake Eyasi, and experienced years of village life and culture clash, but that’s another story (in preparation). In 2003 we moved to Tucson, Arizona, but I still get back to Tanzania every year, mostly leading National Geographic Expeditions.
I’m organizing my own safari to visit Serengeti and other parks in February 2018. If you seriously want to see these wonderful animals in the flesh, send me a message!
Save The Rhino Day
Today’s blog is by Sarah Huebner, a first year PhD student at University of Minnesota’s Lionlab studying under Dr Craig Packer. She writes about Save the Rhino day that was celebrated this week.
Southern White Rhino. Photo: Lucy Hughes
May 1st, 2017 is Save the Rhino Day, a day on which we must ponder what can be done to pull this beautiful animal back from the brink of total destruction. With fewer than 25,000 rhinos remaining in Africa, there is a strong possibility that they could go extinct within our lifetimes if poaching continues at its current pace. In addition to the problems of habitat fragmentation and human-wildlife conflict that all African animals face, rhinos have a target on their backs from poachers and criminal elements seeking to profit from selling their horns.
There are two species of rhinoceros in Africa–black rhinos and white rhinos. Both black and white rhinos have two horns on their heads, a larger one in front and a shorter one behind it. It is estimated that there are only 5,000 black rhinos remaining, down from 850,000 in the mid-20th century. The reason for this dramatic population collapse is poaching and sale of their horns through a criminal network from Africa to Asia. Though the rhino was added to the CITES list of animals banned from trade in 1977, their numbers have continued to crash since then. This is primarily due to the demand in China, Vietnam, and North Korea for use of the horns in jewelry, carvings, as a status symbol, and even in medicine. Some people believe that rhino horn can cure cancer. Scientific evidence clearly shows that rhino horn, made from the same material as our fingernails, is not at all useful in medicine.
Perhaps most distressing is the news that the ban on rhino horn trade in South Africa, home to the largest extant population of rhinos, has been lifted by their court system, clearing the way for the legal export of rhino horns. This does not mean that illegal trade will cease. Indeed, this move gives even more cover to the criminals trafficking rhinos. Though rhinos have the ability to regrow their horns, most are killed before having their horns sawed off, as we saw in the horrifying incident at a French zoo recently. If the rhinos are still alive when the horns are removed, they suffer terrible pain and are left to die, which many do because of blood loss. Impoverished poachers in Africa make very little for their efforts, while importers and sellers in Asia can make as much as US$30,000 for one kilogram of horn. Some estimate that the sale of both the front and back horns together is worth US$250,000. This makes rhino horn more valuable than gold or platinum. Little wonder that private reserves in South Africa wish to profit from the sale of these animals’ parts.
How then do we stop this? Organizations such as the Wildlife Justice Commission and Outraged South Africa Citizens Against Poaching are working to expose the criminal networks responsible for the poaching, smuggling, and selling of these horns in Asia. We can aid these and other conservation groups by helping to finance their initiatives designed to curb poaching. Perhaps the best way we can take action is to pressure our own governments to enact diplomatic sanctions on the countries that continue to look the other way while rhino horns are smuggled across their borders–primarily China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Diplomatic acts such as sanctions, travel bans, and blacklisting by other countries could convince these governments to enforce the national and global laws already on the books concerning rhino horn. On Save the Rhino Day 2017, contact your representatives and tell them that you want them to use diplomatic methods to pressure these countries to stop the import of rhino horn. Or the only way our children and grandchildren will see rhinoceros is in pictures, as we tell them about the magnificent creatures that once walked the earth.
Wildlife Justice Commission: https://wildlifejustice.org/
Outraged South African Citizens Against Poaching: http://vyhub.com/css/css/
Investigative journalism by Al Jazeera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMguWY99q6s
NYTimes–South African Court Ends Ban on Sale of Rhinoceros Horns: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/africa/south-africa-rhinoceros-horns-rhinos.html?_r=0
Snapshot Serengeti 