Serengeti selfie .... and camera trap images !

The Serengeti region is located in northern Tanzania and extends to south-western Kenya spanning  approximately 30,000 km2(12,000 sq mi). The Kenyan part of the Serengeti is known as Maasai Mara. The Serengeti hosts the largest terrestrial mammal migration in the world, which helps secure it as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Africa.  Approximately 70 larger mammal and 500 bird species are found there. Serengeti is derived from the Maasai language, meaning "Endless Plains",

In this Selfie age, people have graduated from snapping pictures to putting themselves in picture.  Microsoft has designed the Lumia 735 explicitly with selfies in mind with features that most users love to do - : take selfies, browse the Web on a high-speed network, and run a few apps.

Tanzania's oldest and most popular national park, the Serengeti, famed for its annual migration, offers arguably the most scintillating game-viewing in Africa: great herds of buffalo, smaller groups of elephant and giraffe, and thousands upon thousands of eland, topi, kongoni, impala and Grant’s gazelle. Hundreds of camera traps in the National Park, Tanzania, are providing a powerful new window into the dynamics of Africa’s most elusive wildlife species. It is the pictures of  different animals caught in millions of camera trap images. Over the last 45 years, the University of Minnesota Lion Project has discovered a lot about lions – everything from why they have manes to why they live in groups.

Away from the melee, Kelly Osbourne has been slammed by fans who are calling her rude and hypocritical for posting a selfie imitating former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal. Kelly Lee Osbourne is a British singer-songwriter, actress, television presenter and fashion designer. The 30-year-old former Fashion Police star posted a selfie on her Instagram account wearing a curly-haired brunette wig with the hash-tags #CallMeRachel and #MyCasualLook.Many have speculated it was in response to the recent drama surrounding Rachel, which involved her own parents ousting her out for pretending to be black.While Kelly may have thought her selfie was a amusing, some of her unimpressed fans clearly disagreed.

Back in Serengeti, one of the largest camera trap studies done reveals the daily lives of its wild inhabitants as they eat, play, nap, and even take inadvertent selfies.The scientists of Snapshot Serengeti mounted 225 cameras in a 434 square mile area as an expansion of the ongoing Serengeti Lion Project and the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute's surveys of major species.The cameras captured 1.2 million sets of photos (three photos per set) from June 2010 to May 2013, according to the study published on June 9 in Scientific Data. They've set up a website can search the whole set of images to find one’s favourites.What they uncovered gives us an idea of what the daily struggle to survive looks like in one of the most varied and unique ecosystems in the world.

One awesome find from the set is this solitary baboon who examines a camera trap and takes an artful selfie.Most baboons living in the Serengeti form huge troops, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. They often spend hours grooming and eating the parasites clinging to fur.Though the baboon troops mostly keep to themselves, they've been found in the same areas as massive herds of zebras and wildebeest, potentially to avoid predation by animals like lions. Wildebeest have even learned to respond to baboons' alarm calls.

Interesting !

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

19^th June 2015.

Photo credit :nationalgeographic.com;  & www.latimes.com/science/