Largest-Ever Camera Trap Survey Reveals the Secret Lives of Serengeti Animals

Camera traps may be revealing the hidden lives on animals on the Serengeti. Researchers have used automatic cameras triggered by heat or motion in order to better understand the behavior of animals in the African savanna.

"This was the largest camera tracking survey conducted in science to date," said Alexandra Swanson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We wanted to study how predators and their prey co-existed across a dynamic landscape. We needed to answer different questions that camera traps had answered previously."

With the citizen science platform Zooniverse, the researchers launched Snapshot Serengeti. More than 28,000 volunteers then classified images, identified species, counted individuals and characterized behaviors. Of the 1.2 million collected images, 322,653 contained animals, with 40 separate species identified, including the aardwolf, zorilla and honey badger.

"Without volunteer help, the research wouldn't have been possible," said Swanson. "Every image was seen by many volunteers, and we created an algorithm to seek consensus in identifications."

The findings not only reveal a bit more about the Serengeti, but also show how citizen scientists can greatly contribute to new discoveries.

"We all know that people are good at pattern recognition, so harnessing the power of volunteers will become increasingly important for ecology studies," said Swanson. "We can engage people with no scientific background to help in producing publishable scientific research at a scope and scale that would otherwise have been impossible."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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