I'm having a very difficult time distinguishing between youths and adults, I end up getting it wrong more times than not.
Got any tips to tell them apart??
You're probably getting it right more often than you think. : ) First, a primer on some terms as described here:
Chimpanzees are considered infants until about 5 years old, at which point they're usually done nursing and being carried by mom.
They're juveniles from 6 to about 15.
After age 15, they're considered adults.
Mark both infants and juveniles as youth in classifcation, but hashtag them separately, so #infant, #juvenile, and #adult are the tag categories.
Some further tips: if a female is old enough to have a sexual swelling, mark as adult. If a male is old enough that you can see obvious testicles, mark as adult. Any chimp with a grey back mark as adult. Any chimp being carried mark as youth. Unlike gorillas, chimps are born with pale faces that darken with age. If you see a chimp with a peachy pink face, it's likely to be a youth, and if you see a chimp with a very dark face, it's likely to be an adult. Young infants and juveniles also have a small white tuft of hair on the bum, seen here on Sugar (not to be confused with the sometimes pale pink rears of adult females):
Older juveniles will lose the tuft, but still not be full body size nor show adult sexual characteristics. @lauraklynn posted a nice picture earlier of a 3 year old male (left) and a 4 year old female (right) that I'm reposting here:
You can see that they have no tufts, but they also don't have adult sexual characteristics (and if there were an adult around, you would see that they are much smaller).
As they get to be a little older, they can be tricky -- we don't even always agree on which ones are young adults or older juveniles! At Crimson Dew, for example, the individual later matched as Fry was given both the temporary ID CDJuv01 and CDMale02. You could very reasonably mark a chimp like him as either youth or adult.
Here he is:
and here's a fully adult male following behind him for comparison:
He's clearly thinner than the adult male, his face is paler, and he doesn't have the grey back that many adults get, but he's mostly full height, his testicles are starting to be visible in clips of him from behind, and he's no longer seen exclusively with mom.
Hope that helps! If there are any particular clips you want to ask about, feel free to link to them. 😃
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wandawmn
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jwidness
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