Monkey see, monkey recognise. That’s what an experimental app is offering to do for conservationists seeking to identify and track primates in the wild. It could even help wildlife crime investigators recognise individuals that have been killed or trafficked .

While some researchers in the field are able to identify individual primates in the small populations they are studying, recognising them quickly in other contexts is very difficult, says Serge Wich at Liverpool John Moores University, who was not involved in the work.

“We put camera traps out or …