Project RattleCam

Welcome to Project RattleCam!

We are excited for community scientists from around the world to help us unlock the secrets of rattlesnake social behavior, something that scientists don't know much about because rattlesnakes are so secretive. In this project, we placed cameras on rookeries ("nurseries" where many female rattlesnakes gather to have their babies in the summer) to capture images that we think will help us understand social behaviors among the snakes. If you help us with this project, you have the chance to peek into the private lives of rattlesnakes, including seeing photos of mother rattlesnakes caring for their brand new babies.

Watch this brief movie to see our beautiful study site and learn about the project.

In this project, community scientists are asked to answer questions about the time lapse images we took at rattlesnake rookeries, which we took every five minutes, for certain things including: are snakes present? are any predators present? are snakes drinking rain water? and more! This helps us go through the vast number of images from our cameras so that we can later zero in on specific sets of images to study these snakes' biology. There are many secrets waiting to be discovered in these never-viewed photos, and we can't wait to learn about them.

Machine learning is becoming very popular as a way of identifying items of interest in images, including wildlife in game camera footage. However, given the way that rattlesnakes entwine together at their dens and rookeries, it is very difficult to tell where one snake ends and another begins! We are working with computer scientists to determine if we can eventually identify and count snakes from these images, but for now we rely on your help to find snakes in the photos.

Specifically, once we have classified all the images with your help, we plan to:

1. Study the social behavior between mother rattlesnakes, between babies, and between mothers and babies. Snakes social behavior is an understudied field, and game cameras can help us learn about it. Do individual snakes hang around preferentially with other snakes? Do mothers "babysit" for other mothers?
2. Describe who predates upon these snakes. There are many hundreds, even thousands, of rattlesnakes at this spot. It is likely that many animals that live in the area, like hawks, owls, bobcats, and coyotes, come there to eat the rattlesnakes.
3. Study the rain catching behavior of the snakes. When it rains, thirsty rattlesnakes flatten their bodies down and drink off their coils. While this behavior has been characterized, it has never been systematically studied in the wild. For example, are newborn rattlesnakes born thirsty? Our project will help answer that.

We will soon be introducing a blog where our scientists discuss the data they hope to obtain from this project in more detail. Stay tuned!

This endeavor brings together faculty and students from the California Polytechnic State University, Dickinson College, and University of California, Santa Cruz. The missing ingredient is YOU!

Before You Begin!

If you are new to Project RattleCam, please watch this short movie to help get you ready to start analyzing images.

Follow us on social media @ RattleCams