To not again fill a post about some scene or individual with unrelated general stuff, I open this new thread. It might not be worth a discussion and is more a question to @PauDG (and maybe @MimiA), but it keeps me occupied.
@MimiA said at some point (I cannot remember where) that we hope and kind of expect to see each chimp on every site at least once. More is cool (I say this). That seems to be true for RW-6 and MF-7 – the sites I know best. We had quite a lot of chimps and could do some nice matches. That’s all.
At CD-8, I have the impression, we are now assuming something different. A very small community with only a limited (that means countable) number of individuals. This is for sure somehow powered by the re-recognition of the very special individuals here (Dodge, Pearl (with Flocke), Esme, maybe Fry).
Yesterday, as far as I understand it @ksigler (and @MimiA) warned to employ this “social” or community approach.
So, as a question: do we expect here a countable population and does it make sense to consider how many individuals with a certain “social” trait (I include here age, presence of a dependent offspring, cycling or not - because these are the ones we talked about and that were criticized) are here or should we refrain from this and only concentrate on clear physical features of the face, limbs, and other markings? Maybe it’s only me, but it’s not clear for me at the moment.
Either approach is fine for me, I just want to clarify.
we can "use" all we want to ID the chimps or to try to figure it out how is the population, but these kind of "social characteristics" are much more difficult to see and to understand than the "physical characteristics", so for example, as we have talked sometime here, see one baby chimp playing with one juvenile doesn't mean that they are sibling, or seen one female with one male, doesn't mean that they will be always together because the chimps have this fission-fusion society. Also the groups may change depending on the season, or availability of food....
Absolutly agree that age (more or less) or presence of a dependent offspring can help us a lot to ID the chimps, but in general we need to use the social characteristics very very carefully, because they are complex, difficult to see, and very difficult to understand.
by
AnLand
moderator
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PauDG
scientist, moderator