What used to be the “lion lab”
## Today’s guest post is from Jessica Timmons, a University of Minnesota undergraduate who has volunteered with the Lion Project since 2010 — before we even dreamed of working with Zooniverse to create Snapshot Serengeti. ###
Before there was Snapshot Serengeti, there was Lion Lab. Lion Lab was located at the University of Minnesota in a small room with two computers and rows upon rows of species reference books, film organized in binders, and beaten, rolled up maps that had seen many days in the field. I liked to think of our “mascot” as a small stuffed lion who I nicknamed Leo that sat on top the main computer’s monitor and watched over those working in lab. Ali’s office was located next door, and many other projects’ researchers had offices in the near vicinity. A bulletin board nearby contained a plethora of bios of the many students who volunteered (just as Snapshot Serengeti volunteers do) to identify species in photographs from the Serengeti.
Lion lab volunteers
My role as the lead undergraduate researcher and volunteer coordinator consisted of working with the project’s volunteers and researchers, acting as a communication channel so that all knew about the exciting happenings in lab. At first I was in charge of organizing volunteers so that each had ample time to ID; since the project was housed on one computer volunteers had to physically come into lab to work with the data. To foster a sense of community, every couple weeks we would host lab meetings where Ali and Craig would talk about all of their experiences in the field and spark a desire in all of us to want to go the Serengeti, too.
As the project grew, there came a time when it became possible to access the program remotely. This meant that volunteers did not have to come into lab anymore and could identify from anywhere they had internet access. Though we could now work from anywhere with the brand, new Serengeti Live program, I and another dedicated volunteer still came into the lab to identify. We loved the atmosphere and always jammed to the Lion King soundtrack as we worked. It was great to have someone to share exciting photo discoveries with – if one of us would spot a lion in an image we would excitedly tell the other then proceed to examine the photo as thoroughly as humanly possible.
Though my job as volunteer coordinator was now irrelevant, I was still someone volunteers could contact with questions. Since so many people now had access to our project, Ali decided it would be a great idea to have a core group of the most active volunteers that could brainstorm ways to keep the project moving forward. So it happened that a small group of us would meet once a week to discuss and execute plans to make the identification process even smoother. We made online tutorials, species reference guides, and helped to raise money for the project by sending out rewards to those who supported us through a RocketHub campaign. It was around this time that Ali announced the exciting news that the project would become accessible to all through a partnership with Zooniverse. Snapshot Serengeti was born, and because of the dedicated volunteers and researchers out in the field incredible things are being discovered daily. I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to watch the project grow into something truly extraordinary from its beginnings on one computer in a little lab at the University of Minnesota.
Not a tame lion
Photo by Daniel Rosengren
A lot of you have seen our collared lions in the camera trap photos. No, they’re not tame – they’re radio-collared. Since 1984, the Serengeti Lion Project has used radio-telemetry to monitor these big cats (See Craig’s post for some Lion Project history).
Now, no matter how lazy the lions appear to be, they can move rather quickly when they want to. So to collar a lion, a Serengeti veterinarian immobilizes the lion with a dart gun; while the lion is immobilized, we take measurements and collect samples to monitor her health. We make the collars snug enough so they don’t get caught in vegetation, but loose enough to be comfortable whether the lion is standing, moving, or (more likely) sleeping.
Once the lions are collared, we still have to find them on a regular basis. Our cars are equipped with a giant antenna (we to learn to “drive in 3D”) that picks up the collar’s signal. We catch the direction by driving in a circle – the signal is loudest in the direction of the collar. However to extend the life of the batteries, we have the signal strength turned down fairly low – we can only hear the collars from an average of 5-10km away on flat ground – so we spend a lot of time driving to the top of hills to capture a signal. We spend a lot of time driving, period.
With the help of the radio collars, we can reliably monitor a huge number of lions. We currently track 24 different prides, each with one collared female. Lions live in fission-fusion societies – they’re usually found in dynamic subgroups of two to seven individuals, all coming together only on occasion, such as if there’s a big meal to be had. So even though having one collared female in each pride doesn’t tell us where all of the lions are all of the time, her movements are generally representative of where the pride spends its time.
The information generated by radio-tracking the lions is…pretty incredible. It means we can find our lions even when they’re in dense areas with poor visibility, or outside of their normal territories. The lions are very habituated to vehicles, especially the Lion Project cars, and we get right up close to identify individual lions based on their unique “whisker spot” patterns.
And with the regular sightings that the radio-collars let us gather, we’re able to map pride territories, and study how these change under different environmental conditions:
Hard to see – but each color shows a different pride territory…
The collars are pretty cool, and have given us a wealth of information about lions. Now the camera traps are letting us learn about all the many other species in Serengeti.
Almost there!
Tomorrow I drive to Serengeti. Finally.
It’s been a long wait – I left Minnesota on December 28th and have been itching to get into the park ever since. As usual, nothing went as expected – mostly annual research clearance renewal obstacles – and so here I am, sitting in Arusha, the “Gateway to Serengeti” chomping at the bit to get inside.
Don’t get me wrong – Arusha has its perks:
- Running water. Hot, running water.
- Food*. Restaurant food. Chinese food. Indian food. Chicken club sandwiches. Fancy salads. Garcinia cambogia coffee. [You will discover that 90% of my mental energy while in the field goes to dreaming about food. Now that Lion House has a proper fridge, this might change. Look for details in an upcoming post: “The Refrigerator.”]
- Indoor toilets.
- Cappuccinos. Espresso. Drip coffee.
- Internet. Wi-fi internet! Reasonably fast wi-fi internet!
- …and other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting in the excitement of prepping for the field.
To be fair, there are always a million and ten things to be done in town, and everything takes ten times longer to do than it does back home, so it’s not like I’ve just been sitting around Arusha languorously waiting to leave. Repairing the grass cutter (I cannot express how crucial this piece of equipment is), for example, takes five visits to various hardware stores, then an eventual half-day of trying to find some hole-in-the wall “engineering” shop on the outskirts of town armed only with an illegible but well-intentioned hand-drawn map provided by the last shopkeeper I’d visited. It’s always an adventure.
Nonetheless, as nice as running water, restaurant food, and to-do-list-checking-off is, I’m excited to get to the park. I miss having elephants pop by the front yard during morning coffee, and the hyenas whooping uncomfortably closely while visiting the choo at night. Alright, back to packing up my trusty Landrover (Arnold, below) — updates to come!
Me with “Arnold”
Love, hate, or somewhere in between?
It’s hard to tell whether the hyenas really love or really hate my cameras.
“Camera, you are going *down*”
Reconsidering…
Nope, definitely going down! (Inside of his mouth — see the canine tooth?)
To be fair, I have seen hyenas absconding with everything from flip-flops to sofa cushions – and there was an unforgettable night where our neighbors were awakened by the crashing about of a hyena who had gotten his head stuck in a mop bucket. The world is their chew toy.
One of our favorite things about camera traps is that they are relatively noninvasive – we think of them as candid cameras, unobtrusively watching the secret lives of Serengeti’s most elusive animals. We don’t bait our cameras to attract animals: we want to capture the natural behaviors of the animals to understand how they are using their landscape – what types of habitat features they prefer, and whether they alter their patterns of use at different times of day, at different times of the year, or in areas where there are lots of competitors or predators.
But it’s a fair question to ask whether the cameras affect animal behavior, and an important one. Stanford graduate student Eric Abelson, is hoping to answer it. If the animals are being attracted to or avoiding areas with cameras, that could change how we interpret our data. In wildlife research, this is known as being trap-happy or trap-shy. For example, say we want to estimate the population size of leopards in Serengeti. Since leopards have unique spot patterns, we can use what is known as Mark-Recapture analysis to calculate the total number of leopards based on the rates that we “re-capture” (or re-photograph) the same individual leopard. Because of the way that the math works out, if animals become trap-shy – avoiding camera traps after an initial encounter — then we would overestimate the total number of individuals in a population.
Fortunately, although researchers in other systems sometimes find trap-shy animals (baby tigers in Nepal, for example), our Serengeti animals don’t seem too bothered – at least not to the point where they avoid an area after encountering a camera trap. Even at night, with the flash firing away, we get photo after photo of the same bunch of playful lion cubs, or repeat visits by the same leopard, cheetah, lion, or hyena week after week.
Also, since the cameras aren’t baited, we don’t think that they’re drawn to the cameras from long distances. Instead, we think that once the animals are close to the camera, they come a little closer to investigate thoroughly.
Hope you enjoy the view!
A note from the field
### I’m still getting sorted out in Tanzania – here’s a post I wrote from my first full field season when I learned how to drive a Land Rover. Excitement. ####
“Oh Dear God, We are going to DIE.”
I remember that phrase on constant repeat in my head during my unprepared and ill-advised ascent of the Polish Tatras. I had decided to climb a mountain in late May with little more than a t-shirt and ultralight rain jacket – the kind that costs an arm and a leg because it weighs no more than a paper clip and fits in a tea-cup – a coarse park map and no compass. Just as I was convinced of my imminent demise then, I am now. “Oh God, we are going to die.” I mutter it under my breath to myself as the ancient Land Rover steering wheel ricochets between my hands. We are on the long road from Arusha to Serengeti, and I am convinced that at any moment the wind will blow us straight off of the fresh tarmac. Even on the best road in the district, the Landy pulls and sways, as though yearning for the ditch along the road, and I constantly remind myself to breathe as I focus hard on staying straight. Dala dalas stuffed with passengers pass by effortlessly but I am scared to turn my head lest I lose my tenuous grip on our straight path forward.
It is June 22, 2010. Today I am 27 years old, crossing that bridge from “mid-20’s” to “late-20’s,” and while I joke about how my bones creak and short-term memory is fading, I am still too young to die. Meshack laughs quietly beside me – he is our prized fundi, our expert mechanic, and is making the long trek to Serengeti for no other reason than to make sure that I (and the car) make it there in one piece. “Twende!” he says, motioning forward. Let’s go. I gulp loudly and clench the wheel tighter. There really is no respite from the terror – on the open tarmac I have to go faster; as we slow for villages there are pedestrians and bicyclists, peddlers and Maasai and livestock that weave alongside the road erratically, and I am convinced that at any moment one of them will meander into the path of my Monster Truck. Winding up the gnarled and pockmarked Crater road are blind turns and oncoming trucks that only further the terror of the already perilous ascent. I am torn between the urgent need to reach the park gates before they close, and my desire to remain alive and in more or less one piece. When we stop at the Crater rim (in part for Patriki to take a picture, in part for me to try and restart my heart), Meshack glances at his watch nervously. Ever so gently, he offers, “Maybe it would be faster if I drive?”
I almost kissed him. The passenger seat in a Land Rover has never felt quite so luxurious – before or since – though I still question my lifespan on a daily basis from the driver seat. For example, George, my coworker on the Lion Project, has been teaching me to drive off road. “It is just fine,” he assures me as we begin to climb the veritable of dusty soil and clumpy vegetation. Except when it is not fine. As we circle and spin and weave through aardvark hole-ridden hilltops, I can see him clutch the window frame suddenly in panic, his foot involuntarily slamming down where the break pedal should be. The Landy falls into the abyss where ground once was. Ka-thunk. I hold my breath and resist the visceral urge to slam on the accelerator and clear away from the danger as fast as I can. The Landy keeps chugging forward, powered by the magic that is low-range. The rear tire plummets to the depths of hell and haltingly crawls back out. We are alive. Barely. George laughs. “Avoid that green grass!” he reminds me. I am lost – it’s all green. “That’s green!” I point, “and that! And that over there!” It is all green and it all looks the same, but George sees some magical difference. I’m told that in time I will see it too. In the meanwhile, however, I maintain my running commentary. “OH dear God, we are going to die!…Oh, okay, we’re okay. Oh that’s a hole! Oh, okay, we are alive. That’s just grass.” …Except when it’s not.
Season 4
Dear devoted Snapshot Serengeti ID-ers: I know the last couple weeks have been tough, especially with the appearance of those two words that strike fear into the heart of every Serengeti addict (I mean ID-er): “We’re done.”
Well, we’ve got good news for you: we’re not really done. Like Margaret wrote the other day, we expected to have several weeks (or more!) to prepare Season 4 for posting. We hadn’t really expected to you guys to process three seasons of images in one week. Clearly. So, it’s been a bit of a scramble…but we’re finally ready to give you Season 4. Even cooler? Yours will be the first eyes to really take a look at these photos.
Prior to launching Snapshot Serengeti, Seasons 1-3 had been looked at by a small group of volunteers on a prototype application called “Serengeti Live.” We’ve been able to use the preliminary data to start answering research questions, refine our analytical methods, and show funding agencies that this project is really cool and worth continuing. However, each image had only been looked at once, so there were a lot of mistakes, which is why we still needed your help with those Seasons.
But Season 4 has never been seen before. It contains all the photographs collected during my last field season in Serengeti – February through July 2012. The rains were pretty bad that season – I can’t tell you how many times I got stuck in the mud trying to get to those cameras. Oh, yeah, and the neighbor’s outdoor toilet (choo in Swahili) sunk. But with the rains came the wildebeest, who honked/mooed (I don’t think there is a word for the sounds they make) outside our homes at night. And in July I lugged back a huge, dust-covered hard drive full of photos.
Choo down!
With every SD card I collect, I do some basic error-checking – so I’ve taken a very cursory flip through the photos and tried to trim down the number of “broken camera” shots of the dirt, grass, or sky, as well as some of the “lawn-mowing” images. But other than that, this is unexplored territory. These photos are new, unseen, unexplored…you’re the first!
I’m excited to see what you find.
Imagine this layer of mud on *everything.*
Earth Wolf
### Today’s post is a guest post from Lora Orme, an undergraduate conducting directed research with us at the University of Minnesota. ###
Often mistaken for a hyena, the aardwolf (whose name means “earth wolf”) of southern and eastern Africa is actually smaller and more docile than its carnivorous cousin (which belongs to a different sub-family). Both the striped and spotted hyenas primarily call large mammals “dinner,” but the aardwolf is more interested in a tasty termite column than meat. Because of its food choice, the aardwolf’s jaw is much less powerful and smaller than a hyena’s jaw, but the aardwolf has a specialized tongue that is longer and sticky. It licks up various insects (with a preference for termites) off of the ground, rocks, and trees with only minor digging with its front claws. For an aardwolf, a fully belly can mean as many as 300,000 termites! The aardwolf will memorize the locations of termite mounds to save the time and effort of finding new snack spots, and will be careful to leave enough of the population alive so that its food source will be “re-stocked.” At the end of a long night of dining on insects, the aardwolf returns home to an under-ground burrow.
At one point, the aardwolf’s burrow most likely was stolen from another small mammal such as a hare, aardvark, or porcupine. Although able to create a new burrow, it takes much less energy for the aardwolf to use a pre-existing one. The burrow provides a safe-haven in the daylight hours when the nocturnal aardwolf normally sleeps or relaxes.
Aardwolves, while primarily solitary, will coexist in groups of six to a dozen neighbor burrows. They congregate for safety in numbers (and more rarely to help rear young), but more often to find a mate. Males will seek females within their own territories and in those of neighbors, sometimes leading to male-male conflicts which are solved with barks, blunt-teeth gnashing, and musky scent-release from glands (the smell of which has been compared to a skunk).
A mating pair will form during the breeding season (spring or fall) and gestation lasts around 100 days, ending in a litter of three to five cubs. Usually birth occurs during the rainiest months of the year when termites are most available, providing plenty of nutrients for the growing young. The males contribute to the partnership by guarding the nest while the females nurse. Both parents supervise the cubs in their first foraging adventures about 3 months after birth.
Because the aardwolf acts as a control on the termite population, it often lives and scavenges near or on farms. Most farmers detest the termites that may destroy crops or infest homes, so they welcome the service of the aardwolves. Unfortunately, aardwolves are preyed upon by some larger carnivorous mammals such as the jackal. Even humans represent a threat to the species because the aardwolf is hunted for its unique fur.
Upon a closer look, aardwolves have distinctive pointed ears for acute hearing; after all, their prey is very small! The aardwolf’s paw is also distinctive from a hyena because it has five toes instead of four. The aspect you might notice first, however, is the bushy pointed tail that looks as if it has been dipped in a can of black or dark brown paint. In a confrontation, an aardwolf’s furry mane will raise from head to tail making it appear larger in size to (hopefully) persuade the opposition to back down.
See if you can spot one of these night-walkers as they prowl for termites!
It begins again.
### I’m traveling to Tanzania currently, about to begin my final field season (which will be Season 6 on Snapshot Serengeti). As usual, I’m running terribly behind getting ready to go – so thought I’d share a blog post I wrote while embarking on Season 2. ###
It Begins Again: Wet Season Survey 2011
As I leave Minnesota, winter seems to be already breaking. Amidst the national mid-winter heatwave, mountains of snow are melting, turning the roads into rivers and the hockey rinks back into lakes. For the third time, I am watching cheesy movies across the atlantic, fast forwarding through day and night, racing the sun eastward across the ocean and winning by 30 lengths like Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes.
Just some of the many casualties. Photo taken by Daniel Rosengren.
Except this doesn’t feel spectacular anymore. I am on my way to Tanzania, once again, with 240 lbs of luggage catapulting around the belly of the plane. My back feels thrown and the plane feels cramped, and the woman sitting next to me snorts and sniffles like some Sesame Street character.
After three weeks of delays, I’m finally heading…home? I’m dreading – just a bit – the madness that awaits me in Serengeti. A solid three weeks behind, I have 200 traps to place in the next 10 days….which happens to be humanly impossible.
See, my research relies primarily on camera traps – remote, automatic cameras that are triggered by heat and motion, attached to trees so that they take pictures of wildlife night and day. On the street they’re known as “hyena bait.” On my street anyway.
Yeah, that’s right. I’ve discovered that hyenas are like big ugly puppies – the world is their chew toy. However, unlike your neighbor’s cute, squirmy blue heeler, hyenas have no responsible owner to say “No! No demolishing the $200 camera trap!” Last year alone, hyenas ate nearly $8,000 in cameras. I would arrive at my excruciatingly selected camera site to find bits and pieces of plastic, the stray LED, a fragment of circuit board…just no camera. Elephants took down about $5,000 in cameras, but with minimal destruction. They typically ripped the offending trap from the tree and flung it out of site. Those cameras usually worked, with some minor case modifications. But the hyena victims? Beyond repair.
Given the abysmal loss rates from the first year of this ambitious (crazy?) camera trapping study, I am now returning to the Serengeti with replacement cameras and heavy duty steel protective cases…which happen to weigh about 1.35 tons apiece. That might be an exaggeration, but the point is that they are very, very heavy. And hopefully hyena-proof.
It is dark outside, though the fancy seat-back TV map says we are smack dab over the Atlantic. I feel like my mind should be racing with plans for my research, or meandering down memory lane – but mostly I am thinking about how good the red wine tastes, and how tired my eyes feel. The night outside seems endless, the world feels far away and frozen in time – like Zach used to do on “Saved by the Bell” – and in my alternate reality I slip guiltlessly into mass-market movies, into staring blankly out the window, the wine wrapping its velvet fingers around my fraying neurons.
I have a million things to do by…yesterday, but my brain is tired and does not want to work. I do not want to think about where on earth I put my hard drive, or the fact that I have not yet filed my taxes despite my imminent disappearance into the bush. I want to fade into the bright, apoplectic flashes of the action movie’s runaway trains or the feel-good underdog story of the horse that could. When I get to Serengeti, it will be a flat-out race against the rains. I want to get my cameras set before the rains keep me hamstrung for days at a time. Today is Feb 19; the rains start at the beginning of March. Can it be done? I guess we’ll see when I get there.
I hope you get paid for that…
Not that long ago, somebody asked me just what it was I was doing at the University of Minnesota. When I described my dissertation research to them, they paused in thoughtful silence, then asked slowly, “Did you ever think about doing something…useful?”
I’m pretty thick-skinned – so that just made me laugh. I love what I do and wouldn’t trade it for the world. But I also think that it really and truly is important. We live increasingly in a world where water comes from the tap, and food from the grocery store. I think it’s important for us to understand how the world works – how all of the puzzle pieces fit together to produce this amazingly vibrant, dynamic mosaic of life…and how our actions might affect it.
And so with that, this post is devoted to all the things that people say when I tell them what I do. I’m curious to hear the lines that other folks get!
The things people say:
— Huh. Did you ever think about doing something…practical?
— I hope you get paid for that…
— Um…what are you going to do with that?
— So, are you going to be able to get a job?
— You’ve been in school for HOW long?
— Really? You get to be a “doctor”?
— Oh! Kind of like the Lion King?
But my personal favorite? “You have the BEST job in the whole world!” I usually hear this from tourists while in the field. They say this from the inside of their air-conditioned cars, on the way back to their hotels with running water and fresh food (that’s been refrigerated!). I am usually dusty when they tell me this, I am covered in tsetse fly bites and Acacia thorn scratches, my nose is sunburned and my arms ache because my Land Rover has no power steering. Part of me wants to point out to them the fact that most of my day is spent playing with power tools or watching lion sleep, and that this in fact is rather boring. Part of me wants to point out that I get fresh meat only every 6 weeks, and have no refrigerator to put it in. That my shower is a bucket, and ever since the spitting cobra incident, I’m a little on edge in the ‘bathroom’. That my toilet is outside and sometimes hard to get to because buffalo like to wander through the yard at night. Yes, a part of me wants to point all of these things out to them…but I don’t. Why? Because in the end…I think they’re right.
Camera Traps are Pretty Cool…
Studying animals in the wild can be incredibly difficult. In Serengeti, for example, many of the animals we might want to know more about are really shy (like leopards), or aggressive (like buffalo and elephants) — and it’s hard to get close to them to study their behavior. Furthermore, a lot of the wildlife we study is nocturnal – meaning the animals are active at night, in the dark, when it’s virtually impossible to watch them in any meaningful way.
Enter camera traps to save the day. If you’re a researcher, a hunter, or a wildlife enthusiast, you’ve probably heard about camera traps. These are remotely triggered cameras that are transforming the way people study wildlife. Instead of taking pictures of the animals, the animals take pictures of themselves!
You might be surprised to discover that camera traps have been around for a long time. A really long time. In the 1890’s, a fellow named George Shiras developed a system so that wildlife triggered a trip wire, which triggered a flash and the camera shutter – producing the first wildlife “self portraits.” He was pretty creative in inducing the animals to trip the wire – for example, to photograph beavers he would tie the trip wire to a dislodged stick in the beaver’s dam. When the beaver went to repair the dam, it triggered the camera!
Modern technology is making camera traps better and more affordable. Cameras today are triggered by a combination of heat and motion – so the animals trigger the cameras merely by walking in front of them. In recent years, the use of camera traps in research has skyrocketed; they are now widely used to identify the presence of rare, endangered, or even presumed-extinct species; they’re used to estimate species densities, patterns of habitat use, predation, and even the relationships between competing species. Sometimes, the animals caught in cameras have unique markings that allow researchers to identify different individuals – for example, tigers have unique stripes, and leopards and cheetahs have unique spots. But even for animals where this isn’t the case, statisticians are hard at work developing methods capable of dealing with the data that camera traps are pulling in.
All of this means that we can ask really cool questions about a variety of species – but it also means you don’t need to be a scientist – or a statistician – to use camera traps to understand the world around you. Ever wondered what your backyard wildlife is doing at night? It’s never too late to find out!
Snapshot Serengeti 