by Matthew Cobb
After yesterday’s fun finding the nightjar, how about using your night-jar spotting skills (or not) to help science?
If you click here you’ll be taken to a site where you can try and spot nightjars in pictures. Your time taken to detect the bird is recorded as part of a ‘citizen science’ project run by the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge. The idea is that you play the role of either a vervet monkey or a mongoose, which have different visual acuity, to see how good you are at detecting your potential prey – the poor old nightjar and its clutch of yummy eggs. The aim is to explore how camouflage works for both eggs and ground-nesting birds, in a complex, real-life situation, using internauts playing the game as a proxy for real-life predators. And of course, above all there is intensive fieldwork.
As the site explains:
Why study camouflage?
Avoiding predation is a crucial aspect of many animals’ fitness. Perhaps the most widespread form of anti-predator defence in nature is camouflage. Although camouflage is a textbook example of natural selection, recent studies have shown that camouflage is far more complex than initially thought, Multiple strategies exist, and different ones may be better suited to different backgrounds and environments.
Through whose eyes should we analyse camouflage?
For a prey animal to be camouflaged, it must be hidden from the eyes of its main predators. It is therefore essential to consider the predator’s visual perception of the environment and camouflage patterns, rather than our own. This is why we model predator vision rather than rely on our own visual perception as humans.
Why is what we’re doing new and interesting?
Until now, the majority of work on camouflage has been undertaken in artificial systems or with artificial prey. Our study is different in that it addresses fundamental issues about how camouflage influences survival in natural environments with real animals. Surprisingly, despite being so important, very little is known about camouflage in complex natural habitats where animals actually live.
Post your scores as monkey or mongoose!
3.32 seconds as a monkey. This was surprising. I thought I was slower than that.
…and 3.88 seconds as a mongoose, but I missed two as a mongoose???
Incredible. It took me 12.5 seconds on average.
2.68 as a monkey. Two took more than ten seconds. The rest took from 0.8 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
4.35 as a mongoose, including one that timed out just as I clicked on it, and several 10+ second ones. Same short time for the others, so it’s right away or nearly never.
Took 10.25 seconds as a mongoose, but 5.55 seconds as a monkey. (And that was fun!)
6.23 seconds as a cell phone using monkey.
3.36 seconds as a monkey and 5.81 as a mongoose. I went hungry one night as a mongoose…
Site is VERY slow – Jerry, you broke Exeter Uni!
3.03 secs as mongoose and 3.65 secs as monkey. Obviously I’m more closely related to mongooseses.
A slightly disappointing 4.58 as a monkey, a mesmerizing slow 5.15 as a mongoose.
I still haven’t found the tiger yet…
I was all over the map – most took around 4 seconds, some around 1 second; 1 was 29.643 seconds; and a number were just under 20 seconds. My average was 8.18 seconds….
A hit and run tactic was good, my best mongoose was ~ 0.2 s (!) so mostly luck.
An average 3.34 s as mongoose.