Snapshot Serengeti

[telophase]

You guys should ALL be poking around Snapshot Serengeti. I've posted about it before, but the short version is that it's crowd-sourced SCIENCE! Camera traps (IR-motion-activated cameras) have been placed at a number (over 200) of spots around the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Every time they get a new season's worth of pics collected and prepped, they upload them and citizen scientists LIKE YOURSELF can go through them and count and ID animals to produce a survey of species and their behavior.

You may encounter such classics as:

BABOON LICKS LENS. (This, from the same sequence is how I know it's a baboon.)
Zebra confab.
Random tourist or researcher photographing camera
Cheetah muzzle scent-marking camera.
Gorgeous photo of wildebeest.
Baby elephant.
My favorite zebra picture.
And much, much more! Although mostly wildebeest!

You will also sort through a lot of pictures of wildebeest genitalia as they like to stand under the trees the cameras are mounted on and the camera is mounted at exactly the right height, but it's worth it.

It's a Zooniverse project. If African wildlife SCIENCE! doesn't do it for you, you can find something there that will. (SPACE WARPS! Undersea adventure! Weather! Music scores (really!))

EDIT: and if you've ever wondered what it's like to be on the business end of a lion scent-marking something, well, now you know... (Click "Play" to see the shots in sequence!)

Comments

[kore]

You will also sort through a lot of pictures of wildebeest genitalia as they like to stand under the trees the cameras are mounted on and the camera is mounted at exactly the right height, but it's worth it.

.....oh dear.

[telophase]

There's a lot of "Yup. That's a male." But it tends to be made up for by things like this young tommy* whose mother really, really wants him to be weaned. (click the Play button to watch her try to escape.)


* Thomson's gazelle.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I've done it a couple of times now and it really is a ton of fun. But the star projects look pretty shiny too....

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I had a hard time doing the star project I tried. It was the Space Warps one. And it was difficult because I kept staring at the pictures and thinking that it was taken by a big telescope and covered a teeny fraction of the sky and that many, if not most, of those objects I was looking at were GALAXIES.

MIND = BLOWN

CONTINUOUSLY