Half of the wildebeests in the Serengeti are seemingly “missing” in the latest survey of the region. An AI-driven model has unexpectedly shown there are fewer than 600,000 wildebeests in this part of East Africa – less than half the previous estimate of 1.3 million. The team trained two powerful deep-learning models on more than 70,000 images of wildebeests, teaching them to recognize the animals. The AI models suggested there were around 324,202 to 337,926 wildebeests in 2022 and 502,917 to 533,137 in 2023. The paper notes that this latest count “may even be considered an overestimate” since the AI can confuse wildebeests with zebras and other migrating animals.