The Cheetah Watch Campaign reaches 1500 sightings!
Thank you to all our contributors
We have exciting news – the Cheetah Watch Campaign has reached and exceeded 1500 contributions! This is a great achievement for which we sincerely thank all the people who have shared their cheetah sightings with us and contributed to us reaching this grand total!
The Campaign began back in 2000 and since then has been collecting data about the cheetahs of Tanzania. For those of you unfamiliar with how it all works, we ask people who see cheetahs during their time in Tanzania to send us pictures of the individuals they have seen along with some basic information about when and where they saw them. In return, if it is a cheetah already known to us at the Serengeti Cheetah Project, we send them information about “their” cheetah, including things like the cheetah’s name and age. Many of the cheetahs found in the Serengeti have been known to the project since they were very young cubs and a lot of the families are known going back several generations so we love having the opportunity to share all the information we have about the cheetahs with everyone! It’s also great to get all the positive feedback from people who are really happy to find out about who it was that they saw.
In addition to all the feel-good benefits there have also been some really significant scientific gains from the Campaign, which have been important for cheetah conservation. These include finding out that, although there isn’t a settled population there, cheetahs use Lake Manyara National Park as a corridor to travel between other habitat areas. We’ve also been able to found out where some of our cheetahs go when they disappear from our study area – one example was when a contributor sent in pictures of Muscat, a cheetah normally seen in the heart of the Serengeti plains, near the Ngorongoro crater. It was a surprise to hear of her being so far from her usual haunts, something we would never have known of if it wasn’t for Cheetah Watch as she was well outside our study area!
So once again, we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has helped us so far and we look forward to reaching the next big milestone!