You get a close up image of a face, they're stunning.Just those huge eyes, and there's a lot of detail in whisker patterns and all sorts of stuff. They really are beautiful.So, Alexander and his team decided to capitalize on the dramatic facial features of mountain lions.They added a few gadgets to their camera traps so that when motion was detected, a cougar kitten call was played.This noise reliably peaked the interest of passerby pumas so that they looked up long enough for the camera trap to grab a face shot.Five independent investigators reviewed the puma headshots and attempted to ID the individual animals.Compared to the traditional side angle camera trap, the new attention-getting device was about 92% more accurate.This work was recently published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.This study is an important step on the path to being able to more confidently identify and track animals, in a really scalable way.Snapping headshots of mountain lions also opens up new opportunities to involve AI techniques.Like, the facial recognition technology used by airport security ― this could really expedite the image analyzation process for researchers.I think that's very possible.That could be a really useful technique in the future.There have been a lot of other facial recognition studies done on animals, but it's never been with a camera trap.So that was kind of the unique thing about this study was merging these two ideas.And beyond being able to more precisely understand how many mountain lions are in an area, Alexander says that this new camera trap method could be used for tracking other critters that lack distinguishing side colors but have unique features elsewhere.