Image Quality Explained
A Snapshot Serengeti Camera-trap image
Those of you who have been with us for some time will probably have noticed that the image quality since we switched to the Snapshot Safari platform has reduced, sometimes dramatically. Before I go any further, we are trying hard to fix this but in the meantime I thought I would try and explain what the issues are in a hope that it may induce a little more patience from you. I am afraid that I really am technically challenged when it comes to computer stuff so I am going to be a little vague here but please, if there is anyone out there with more knowledge who can either help explain more appropriately or better still offer our team help don’t hesitate to get in touch.
So the trouble all started when Snapshot Serengeti joined the bigger Snapshot Safari platform at the start of this year. At this time Zooniverse was having a big overhaul with older projects operating on Ouroboros moving over to the Panoptes format. Essentially Ouroboros and Panoptes are both software packages which enable projects to build their pages and run them.
Of course Snapshot Serengeti being one of the oldest Zooniverse projects was designed using Ouroboros and has had some teething problems with the switch over. One thing to remember is that the teams involved with bringing all the camera trap images to the Snapshot Serengeti platform are for the most part unpaid graduate and undergraduate students studying ecology. They are not experts in computer programming yet have to keep the platforms running and fix all the problems.
In the old days the University of Minnesota based team would upload the batches of images from the camera traps and send them to Zooniverse who would process and upload them to the platforms. That was when there were a dozen or so projects. There are now over 50 active projects. Can you imagine how long it would take for Zooniverse to do all the uploading? To address this problem they have asked individual projects to manage the uploading themselves. To complicate this process a little more they have also placed a 600GB maximum file size on the images.
This all means that the team of ecologists at Minnesota have to engage computer code developers to write custom scripts enabling their super computers to interact with the Zooniverse web platform. The image quality issue then is not because we have started using different camera’s or taking images at a lower resolution it is due to the code that compresses the images from their full size to less than 600GB. Those images that were smaller in the first place have been less effected than the larger ones and hence the mixture of quality that we are seeing.
So as I said earlier we are trying hard to get this problem sorted and bring you back the kind of top rate images you are used to and hope to have things sorted with the next batch of images we upload. In the meantime please spare a thought for the team and remember that like you they are all volunteers, all be t with a slightly more vested interest in the research project. I hope that you will bear with us and keep up the much needed support you have always given us.
A Touch Of Colour
After my latest field trip to Namibia I was fortunate enough to spend a few weeks visiting some old haunts in South Africa. Even though I had very little time and no real scientific purpose other than curiosity I could not help but put out my camera traps whilst I was there. It was after all a nature reserve and surprises can happen.
One of the camera traps was located on a well used animal track that lead from the bush down to the river. The rains had not thus far been kind in that part of Africa and the bush was rather dry with little standing water so I was confident the track would offer some interesting images. As expected I had lots of images of vervet monkey, warthog, impala, nyala and waterbuck. Imagine my surprise then when I scrolled through 20 or so images of a small herd of waterbuck does with young to find this fluffy looking white thing that looked more like a sheep!
Leucistic Waterbuck
In fact it was a leucisitic waterbuck. Not to be confused with albinism, which is a condition caused by absence of melanin leading to pale skin, hair, feathers and eyes, leucism is defined as a partial loss of pigmentation that leads to an animal appearing pale or patchy but often with patterns still showing. The eyes in animals with leucism are normally coloured never the red that can occur in albinism. So albinism is a lack of melanin and leucism is a partial lack of melanin.
You can see this little waterbuck still has the distinctive bulls eye target ring around its rump that distinguish the common water buck from the Defassa waterbuck we are used to in the Serengeti proving it is leucistic not albino.
Regardless of which of the two conditions it has the young animal will have a tough time. The pale colour makes it stand out as a target to predators and it is thought that survival rates for leucistic animals are low. That’s not to say it won’t make it to adult hood, in fact the white lions of the Timbavati are a well followed case of leucism in a population that every now and then throws up a white cub or two, they are so well watched that it is known that some do survive into adult hood. From those few individuals stem most of the white lions that can be seen in captivity in zoos all be it showing all kinds of horrible traits of constant inbreeding.
After finding these images I was lucky enough to spot the herd with my own eyes. I watched the little leucistic waterbuck playing and frolicking with a like aged normal waterbuck and for all the world you wouldn’t know what all the fuss was about. The two were identical in every way except the pure chance of a mutated gene governing colour. Good luck to the pair of them.
Best of Friends
Symbiotic relationships are common in the Serengeti. They fall into two main types, mutualism, whereby both partners benefit from one another and commensalism, whereby one partner benefits from the actions of the other but the other partner is largely unaffected or unharmed. I wrote recently of oxpeckers and large herbivores, large herbivores provide food in the form of ticks for the oxpeckers and oxpeckers provide a cleaning service for the large herbivores, a good example of mutualism. Birds such as cattle egrets that follow buffalo around to catch the invertebrates the buffalo disturb as they graze is an example of commensalism. Of course it is not just animals that have symbiotic relationships; my blog last week on termites and mushrooms was another example of mutualism.
So what about zebras and wildebeests? We see them all the time on Snapshot Serengeti in mixed herds, grazing peaceably with one another. Is this just coincidence or is this a form of symbiosis?
It is actually hard to say and of course that is why labelling things, especially behaviour is often tricky.
Zebra and wildebeest are both grazers meaning they mostly eat grasses but that doesn’t mean they share the same diet. They preferentially eat different parts of the plants that they consume. Zebras are quite content chewing longer tougher grasses where as wildebeest prefer shorter, more tender shoots. This partition of resources means they can quite happily graze side by side with out exerting pressure on each other.
Another good reason to team up is the extra safety that numbers provide. Not only do more ears and eyes provide better early warning systems but the odds of the individual being targeted by a predator are reduced when there are greater numbers to choose from. Apparently zebra have better eyesight but wildebeest have better hearing so the two complement each other.
There could be another reason. Our very own Meredith Palmer just published a paper about interspecies reaction to each other’s alarm calls, you can read it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347217304207
She found that zebra, wildebeest and impala recognise each other’s alarm calls but that they did not always respond in the same manner. When zebra sounded the alarm all three herbivores reacted strongly but when impala gave the alarm zebra where likely to ignore it, or assess the relative danger themselves. It seems that this varied response is down to predator size. Impala are prey to a wide range of smaller predators that would not be able to handle a mammal the size of a zebra, so when impala give the call it doesn’t always signal danger for the zebra. However when a zebra, the largest of the three herbivores sounds the alarm, whatever it has seen will probably be able to take down the wildebeest or the impala too so it’s prudent that all three scarper.
It is an interesting reaction and maybe wildebeest hang out with zebra because they are more trustworthy alarmists. I am not sure that the companionship of zebra and wildebeest can be classed as symbiotic I think it is more of an interaction due to a shared habitat but it seems that on some level they can benefit each other.
Snapshot Serengeti 