This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Tracking wildlife is a tough job.

Take the case of a one-eared leopard named Pavarotti for this guy.

He was like a very, very big beautiful male and you had a very, very deep, deep roar and so they

end up after Pavroi.

Kassam Raffique, a wildlife biologist at Liverpool, John Moore's University.

So I used to get up at the crack of dawn and I would find his tracks and I would follow his tracks and try and find them.

So one day I went out and I was looking for him and his tracks took me off roads through this like

woodland area and...

Before he knew it, the wheel of his Land rover was stuck in a worthog burrow.

He wasted several hours getting it out, and then on the way back to camp he bumped into some local

tour guides in their safari guests, who'd had way better luck spotting Pavarotti.

And basically the last thing they told me that they'd seen him that morning.

Rafiq then realized that tourist wildlife sightings might be an untapped source of information

about wild animals.

So he and his team worked with a safari lodge in Botswana

to analyze 25,000 tourist photographs of wildlife.

They used those as sightings of lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetas, and wild dogs.

They then compared those data to the estimates they made with traditional wildlife biology

tactics, stuff like camera traps and track surveys and call-in stations, where they play sounds

of distressed animals in the middle of the night, and see who pops by.

...