This Is What Serengeti Animals Do When Nobody’s Looking

Zebras, cheetahs, and giraffes, oh my!

By Mary Beth Griggs | Published Jun 9, 2015 6:30 PM EDT

Environment

Giraffe at Sunset — Some of the pictures captured by the camera traps were so perfectly framed that they looked like a human photographer had captured them instead of a motion sensor. Snapshot Serengeti

There are surveillance cameras everywhere–on street corners, in airports, and even in the middle of the Serengeti.

Researchers set up 225 camera traps in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania to get an idea of how animals behaved when people weren’t looking. Between 2010 and 2013, the cameras captured 1.2 million sets of pictures, the largest camera trap survey ever conducted.

In results published today in Scientific Data, the researchers credit 28,000 citizen scientists who helped sort through the huge trove of pictures via the Snapshot Serengeti project. With their help, the scientists were able to create a huge, searchable database that they hope will be a model for other large datasets in the future. Take a look at a few of their amazing images in the gallery above.

Giraffe at Sunset

Some of the pictures captured by the camera traps were so perfectly framed that they looked like a human photographer had captured them instead of a motion sensor.