jodycb's Journal

After four years of not using iNaturalist I'm back. I've been having fun seeing what has changed.

Since getting obsessed with iNaturalist again about a week ago after a very long hiatus. I find myself looking just a little bit closer at everything and finding that I see differences in things that I just lumped into one group. It reminds me of when I suddenly recognized that beech drops as their own thing a few years ago. They had always just registered as dead plants on the forest floor. As soon as I saw one, I could see them everywhere and almost couldn't see how I ever could have overlooked them.

Yesterday I was out for a walk and took a photo of a Japanese Beetle because I thought it would just be fun to add it to my iNaturalist collection but I didn't think much about it. It was just a Japanese beetle. They're everywhere.

"Japanese Beetle"

But when I went in to ID it for sure, I realized it was not a Japanese Beetle at all. It seems to be a Dogbane Leaf Beetle, something I didn't even know existed. Suddenly, all greenish metallic beetles aren't just Japanese Beetles anymore.

It's like putting on glasses for the first time when you had no idea your vision was not 20/20.