Research
Tool use and culture
The Moyen-Bafing chimpanzees rely heavily on tools to extract food, including the fishing for algae during the dry season and extracting termites and ants from their nests. Using camera traps we study these tool use behaviours across six chimpanzee communities, addressing questions on tool use ontogeny and techniques, social learning, group differences, feeding ecology, and more.
Machine learning
While camera-traps offer researchers an incredible way to collect large quantities of data, manually processing them can be extremely time intensive. We use deep learning models to help us automate identifying species, individuals, and the different behaviour we are interested in. Got 5min? You can help us train these models here!
Oxygen isotopes
Oxygen isotopes are robust tracers of current and past hydrological landscapes, providing important information about ecology and behaviour in evolutionary history. We are part of a large-scale collaborative endeavour aimed at capturing oxygen isotope (δ17O and δ18O) variation across diverse primate habitats using rainfall and surface water.
Stay tuned for more!