For more than a decade, 225 motion-triggered cameras strapped to trees across the Serengeti have fired day and night, and the millions of photographs they produced were sorted one by one by hundreds o

A decade of wildlife surveillance across the Serengeti produced millions of images—but only crowdsourced patience could turn them into science.

Published September 21, 2026 · How we edit

Open your phone and scroll back to the least interesting photo in your camera roll. A blurry parking lot, maybe, or the inside of a pocket.

Now picture an entire folder of nothing but that: thousands of near-identical frames of grass and wind, with the occasional tail disappearing out of the corner of the shot. Your job is to look at every single one and say honestly what you saw. Would you make it past the first hundred before giving up?