Camera Traps Capture a Year of Rare Animals Living in East Africa

A year-long camera trap survey in Tanzania has captured 150,000 images of endangered and elusive animals, including a rare type of African wild cat recorded in the country for the first time.

Over the last year, more than 300 camera traps have been deployed in western Tanzania, East Africa — across an area roughly the size of West Africa’s Cape Verde — recording hundreds of thousands of images of wildlife including lions, leopards, bushbabies, aardwolves, bat-eared foxes, and springhares.

The camera trap study, conducted by Panthera Tanzania, has produced several notable findings, including the first confirmed records in Tanzania of servals with a rare coat pattern. The serval is an African wild cat known for its distinctive proportions and hunting ability. It has a small head, large ears, a long neck, and long legs, which are the longest of any cat relative to its body size. However, the servals captured by the camera traps in Tanzania are the so-called “servaline morph” which has smaller, freckle-like spots instead of the larger black spots seen on typical servals.

“When reviewing the photos from our first camera trap surveys in western Tanzania in 2025, we were very excited to come across two different kinds of servals: normal servals, which have black spots, and “servaline” servals, which have smaller, freckle-like spots,” Dr. Charlotte Searle, Senior Ecologist & Data Specialist of Panthera Tanzania, says. “Both colourations are the same species but the servaline morph is much more rare, with the few confirmed records coming from sites in the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. The photos from our surveys in Luganzo-Tongwe and Ugalla Game Reserves are the first confirmed records of this colour morph in the country.”

Dr. Searle says camera traps allow researchers to document rare servals and other elusive animals that they would be unlikely to encounter in person. The camera traps also recorded rare melanistic genets and bushbabies, along with some of the first records of aardwolves, bat-eared foxes and springhares in western Tanzania.

“Seeing a serval is already quite a lucky occurrence, so seeing a servaline serval would really be something special. The sites we work in in western Tanzania are very wild, and the animals there can be skittish as they’re not used to people, so we haven’t had the good luck of seeing one yet. However – luckily for us – camera traps are unobtrusive and can be left in the field for months at a time, so they have a tendency to unveil new and exciting insights that we would be unlikely to see in person,” Dr Searle explains.

She adds: “In addition to the servaline servals, in 2025 our cameras documented rare melanistic genets and bushbabies, and confirmed the presence of a number of species that weren’t known to be in the area. Given the lack of research across many of Africa’s wilderness areas, this shows us how much more there is left to learn about the continent’s wildlife populations.”

The findings also highlight conservation concerns for the region’s larger predators. Lion populations in Ugalla and Luganzo-Tongwe Game Reserves are well below the levels that their habitat could support. The animals face threats including bushmeat snares, vehicle strikes, and encroachment from a rapidly expanding human population.