Long-term chimpanzee field sites — pioneered by Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream from 1960 onward — rest on two unglamorous methodological choices: patiently habituating wild animals to a human observer's presence without altering their natural behaviour, and then recording that behaviour with a disciplined, repeatable sampling protocol so decades of data stay comparable.
Full habituation at Gombe took David Greybeard and the other pioneer chimpanzees roughly a year of near-daily contact — and the resulting decades-long records are still yielding new findings on tool use, culture and social bonds today.
A 3D forest clearing where a chimpanzee troop's tolerance of a human observer depends on cumulative habituation, and a live focal-sample ethogram tracks one identified individual's time budget exactly as field researchers have since Gombe in the 1960s.
Raising habituation shrinks the troop's flight distance; crossing that boundary flips the group from calm to vigilant to fleeing. Meanwhile the panel logs real elapsed seconds the focal subject spends feeding, resting, grooming, moving, or reacting to the observer.
Move habituation and observer-distance sliders to see the troop's response threshold shift, pick a focal subject from the dropdown, toggle named vs numbered labels, and reset the ethogram timers to start a fresh observation session.
Jane Goodall's decision to name rather than number her subjects was controversial at the time — critics said it risked anthropomorphism — but it became standard practice once her records showed named individuals had distinct, trackable personalities and life histories.