Our Observation of the Week is this helmeted iguana, seen in Colombia by @khristimantis!

“I was in a field trip accompanying a herpetology course in a natural reserve called Hacienda San Pedro,” recalls Khristian Venegas Valencia, a biology student at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. The reserve is located in the Magdalena Medio, which Khristian says “is today one of the regions most affected by livestock in Colombia [and] a large part of the forests and ecosystems of the region have been reduced or almost completely disappeared. However, thanks to the initiative of some people it is possible to find some relicts of forests that function as sanctuaries and natural reserves that allow the conservation and care of nature.”

During their time in the reserve, Khristian, who is interested in the ecology, conservation, systematics and taxonomy of neotropical amphibians, and his colleagues made some great finds, such as glass frogs and a terciopelo viper. Then,

coincidentally, following the advertising call of a frog of the genus Pristimantis, I came across the [helmted iguana] perched on a branch. It was a fascinating encounter since these organisms are quite difficult to observe and I had not had the opportunity to register one before.

Usually found in trees (when they are found), helmeted iguanas - also called casque headed lizards - rely on the sit-and-wait method of predation, often staying in one place for extended periods of time until suitable prey such as insects, spiders, or other lizards approach. Their lack of motion, in addition to their camouflage, allows these lizards to go unnoticed by both their prey and their predators. Both males and females have a “helmet”, but the male’s is slightly larger.  

“I have always been interested in scientific divulgation and the transmission of information to the community in general,” says Khristian (above, with a helmeted iguana). “I use iNaturalist as a documentation tool and as a source of learning about biodiversity in my country.”

- Helmeted iguanas have been found with plants and fungi growing on them, likely due to their proclivity for remaining motionless for extended periods.

- Slime mold sporangia have also been found on a helmeted iguana! [PDF] 

- If you have always dreamed of seeing a helmeted iguana remain motionless while ants crawled on it and epic choral music swelled in the background, you’re in luck. 

We've just made the following changes

1) To send a message you must have 3 verifiable observations or 3 identifications added for others. New users who haven't met this requirement will still be able to reply to messages.
2) To make a traditional project or a place you must have 50 verifiable observations. New users who haven't met this requirement can still make new collection and umbrella projects.

A verifiable observation is an observation that has a date, a location, media evidence (image or sound), and has not been voted captive/cultivated.

There are a few reasons we're doing this, but first and foremost is to emphasize that iNat is about observations and identifications. Everything else is secondary, if not tertiary, and folks who want to use iNat's other features should always understand the iNat experience from the perspective of an observer and/or an identifier. We see a lot of people signing up for iNat and trying to make a project right off the bat, which often leads to some confusion on the project creator's part about the behavior of their participants or what all the various settings mean. I would have preferred to apply this restriction to collection and umbrella projects as well, but that seemed to get a lot of pushback. Places have similar problems, largely because of people creating place records for places that already exist.

There are also some technical reasons for doing this, particularly regarding places. Making new places that encompass lots of observations kicks off automated background jobs that can take a really, really long time, and sometimes that affects site performance for everyone. One could argue that no one should have the ability to do this, but we feel pretty strongly that new users definitely should not be able to do this.

Regarding messages, recent phishing campaigns have convinced us that we need to make it a little harder for new users to send messages. We don't think three observations or three identifications is a very high bar, but hopefully it will dissuade some bad actors.

As with everything else on the site, this is all subject to change, so if we need to raise these barriers higher, or remove them again, we'll reconsider.

Our Observation of the Week is this Common Hoopoe, seen in the Czech Republic by @lioneska!

“A few years ago, I became seriously interested in birds thanks to one of my friends,” says Gabi Lioneska Uhrova. It took me a long time though to get to know them…[but] I can say that I’ve become a loony (crazy) in observing them and I started to take pictures of them too. I’ve also become a member of the Czech Society for Ornithology.”

After hearing about a Common Hoopoe sighting in Prague, Gabi decided to check out the area after work the next day and started scanning for the bird with her binoculars. After some time she stumbled across it on the path in front of her, no more than twenty meters away, and watched it pick up an insect.

My heart jumped with joy. “Ohh, you are so beautiful, little bird,” I thought to myself. The advantage was that it was quite tame, and its escape distance was short. When disturbed it would fly to a tree and then continue to forage for food again.

Later on a friend of mine, Tereza, joined me to take picture of it. My goal was to lie down and take a picture of it in its natural habitat, grass, which I managed to do thanks to its tame behaviour. After that we just sat there and watched this amazing bird using its long thin beak as tweezers. We were simply so lucky. This is one of my most precious bird observations because I had not seen one in a long time and it is a rare species for me. I was really grateful for this opportunity.

The Common Hoopoe ranges through much of Europe, Asia, and into southern Africa, and as Gabi described, it likes to forage for insects in flat grassy areas. Much of the foraging is done with its long thin beak, with which it probes the ground for insects, and it will raise the crest on its head when excited. Hoopoes nest in tree cavities, or really any cavity on a vertical surface.

In addition to birds, Gabi (above, on the right) loves to photograph and observe butterflies. “During spring and summer season I often make trips to different types of habitats to watch them,” she says. “It isn’t easy to take a good picture of them; it’s always a challenge but I love it, I take my time and enjoy it.”

Gabi first discovered iNaturalist during the 2018 City Nature Challenge, and tells me “Now I upload most of my observations of nature [to iNaturalist]. Sometimes there is no time to do it all at once. I love the application because it is so simple to use, and I have overview of all my observations at one place...If I see a beetle or other interesting insect or a flower, I take picture of them too and post it to iNaturalist or Facebook groups that we have in my country for determination.”

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes were lightly edited for flow.

- An adult hoopoe feeds its young - in slow motion!

- Some nice footage of foraging hoopoes.

Our Observation of the Week is this ovipositing Atanycolus wasp, seen in Russia by ropro!

In my experience, most people associate the word “wasp” with members of the Vespid family, such as hornets and paper wasps. And for good reason, as many of them are large, colorful, often found around humans, and can deliver a painful sting. But the world of wasps is endlessly fascinating, and that includes parasitoid ones such as the Atanycolus wasp seen above.

The photographer, Roman, tells me he came across this individual during mid-August, and it was one of several braconids he found on a fallen birch tree. Fallen birches, he says, are often great places to find wasps, “from Giant ichneumon wasps (Megarhyssa) to such small ones (the one in the picture, about five millimeters). Therefore, if I see a fallen birch, then I will definitely look at it.”

Why so many wasps around an old tree? Well, that’s where they can find food and a home for their young. Many other insects, such as long-horned beetles and some species of lepidoptera, lay their eggs here, and their larvae bore through the wood. Wasps like the Atanycolus photographed by Roman take advantage of this by using their long ovipositors to “drill” into the wood and lay their eggs on these larvae. The wasp larvae then parasitize the larvae of the other insects, either internally or from the outside, and usually wind up killing their hosts. This mother wasp, in fact, was so focused on her work, that Roman explains “it was easy to photograph, because the braconids did not react to my close presence and were inactive. The only difficulty was their small size.”

Always interested in nature, Roman says that ten years ago he bought a digital camera and, “after moving to a new place of residence, where was a large park nearby, I began to photograph insects, plants and birds there.

I have recently started to upload my own observations [to iNaturalist] and I [have] became interested in butterflies and moth of Central and South America here. They are very unusual there [and I am] trying to identify them.

- by Tony Iwane.

- PBS’s Deep Look has a nice video explaining Megarhyssa oviposition.

Guest post by City Nature Challenge co-organizers Lila Higgins (@lhiggins) from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Alison Young (@kestrel) from the California Academy of Sciences

It’s early morning in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the City Nature Challenge began in 2016, but it’s midnight in Christchurch, New Zealand where the first city begins the challenge this year on Friday, April 26. From now until 11:59 pm in Maui, Hawaii on Monday, April 29, people will be out in almost 160 cities documenting their local biodiversity.

Observations must be made between April 26 and 29, but can still be uploaded and identified until 9 am local time on Monday, May 6. The final tally from each project will be recorded at that time with the complete results announced later on Monday, May 6 after the tally is made in Maui. During the challenge and beyond, you can watch the dynamic leaderboard on the City Nature Challenge umbrella project to see how the cities rank and easily click through to individual city projects.

If you want to read more about the origin and past results of the City Nature Challenge, check out:
-Last year’s blog post
-The official City Nature Challenge website
-City Nature Challenge projects from 2016, 2017, and 2018.

If your city is part of the challenge this year - good luck and have a great time! Even if your city is not participating in this year’s challenge, we hope you have a chance to get outside and document your own local nature as part of this global event celebrating biodiversity in and around urban areas. The more we know about biodiversity in cities, the better we can plan for cities of the future that work for humans and wildlife. And if you’re interested in organizing the City Nature Challenge in your city in 2020, please sign up here.

The short version: You can use these links to filter for observations made by users who created their accounts in the last day or last week. Uncheck “verifiable” in filters to see even more observations that could use additional guidance. Bookmark these links to verifiable observations in the identify tool needing identification from new users in the last day or week. For dealing with common observation issues, you can copy/paste from these frequently used responses.

From the iNaturalist Stats page

We’re in the April bump! April tends to have several factors driving people to iNaturalist:
-Northern Hemisphere spring
-Earth Day/month activities, press, and promotion (e.g. there was a big media promotion in the UK last week)
-City Nature Challenge happening in 160+ cities around the world April 26-29

With all the new users, it helps to have more experienced members of the community as welcoming guides to help people correct common observation and identification mistakes and improve the likelihood that their future observations will be identifiable by the community. No one can do this task alone, but if we each take a few minutes to help a few people, then together we help steer new people in the right direction.

You can add additional query parameters such as &user_after=1d to a url to only see observations from users who created their accounts in the last day.
E.g. Observations from users who joined:
In the last 2 days (&user_after=2d)
In the last 1 week (&user_after=1w)
More than 1 month ago (&user_before=1m) (if you don’t have the patience to work with brand new users at the moment!)

Want to filter just for observations made from a mobile app? Add &oauth_application_id=2 for Android and &oauth_application_id=3 for iOS.
E.g. iOS observations from users who joined in the last 2 days
Android observations from users who joined in the last week

There are even more tips from @bouteloua posted in the Forum on dealing with low quality and inappropriate content on iNaturalist.

If welcoming new users isn’t your thing and you’d rather just focus strictly on identifications, that’s great too! We know there are hundreds of you who are extremely dedicated identifiers with thousands of identifications and 70K+ people have chipped in. iNaturalist works because of many people doing good things to help each other, so thanks for everything and anything that you’re doing to help.

-by Carrie Seltzer

Our Observation of the Week is this large group of Cottonmouths, seen in the United States by @wildlandblogger!

A few weeks go, while on a hike in a central part of North America, looking for birds and plants Jared Gorrell had gotten a bit lost but was able to use his phone’s GPS to navigate back to his car. However, something caught his eye. “I noticed a pond along the way and decided to look around it and see if I could find some birds, insects or plants that would be new for me,” he recalls.

I didn’t realize the pond had dirt cliffs around it, and as I walked downslope I nearly stumbled over the edge of one of these, and then I looked down into that pile of cottonmouths. I backed up and sat down, and then proceeded to put my hand down six inches from a juvenile cottonmouth. After moving it out of the way with a long stick and then going uphill to have a slight panic attack over the close call, I came back down to take pictures and count.

You definitely don’t want to get bitten by a cottonmouth, which is a viper endemic to the United States. While fatalities are rare, this species’ cytotoxic venom can cause severe tissue damage and pain. Although it has a fierce reputation, this snake (like most others) is not aggressive (PDF) and will choose to either escape or engage in threat displays when encountering a human. One of those displays involves showing off the bright white interior of its mouth, giving the species its common name (although it’s also known as a water moccasin, as well). These semi-aquatic snakes eat a wide variety of prey and are often found near water sources, although usually not in such large numbers.

“What you see in the photo is a pile of sunning cottonmouths that have recently emerged from a den site, presumably someplace on a nearby hill,” says Jared.

In this temperate area, snakes form groups like this in sunny spots to warm up more quickly, after leaving a cool underground refuge where they spent the previous winter. Unfortunately, many of these “mass emergences” have been targeted by locals afraid of venomous snakes, so this “ball of cottonmouths” is a rare sighting nowadays, and I’ve intentionally kept the location private for that reason...since poaching and/or harassment are serious issues for reptiles like these cottonmouths, I generally obscure or privatize my herp locations.

Jared, who tells me “at three years old I spoke vaguely with an Australian accent because I watched Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, so often,” will soon be graduating from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale with a degree in plant biology specializing in ecology, and this summer plans on “working with the Critical Trends Assessment Program in Illinois surveying plants and insects at various field sites across the state.”

And during his free time, Jared’s out and about looking for plants, birds, reptiles and amphibians, and has “recently developed an interest in dipnetting for fish and netting for dragonflies and butterflies.” He uses iNat to “log all of my sightings, compete with friends, and share my observations with those around me. iNaturalist has inspired my interest in dragonflies, butterflies and fish, especially fish since they’re so under-reported on this website. I definitely take a lot more pictures now too!”

- by Tony Iwane

- Bird and Moon has a great comic about the myths and facts surrounding cottonmouth snakes.

- Here’s thorough advice on how to survive a snakebite in the wilderness. (Disclosure: I previously worked with Jordan Benjamin, founder of The Asclepius Snakebite Foundation)

- Water snakes of the genus Nerodia are often mistaken for cottonmouths. The University of Florida has a nice resource showing you how to differentiate them.

Our Observation of the Week is this Long-banded Silverline butterfly, seen in Thailand by @lesday!

If not for “a very nasty motorcycle accident” a few months ago, it’s possible the photo you see above would not have been posted on iNaturalist. But we’ll get there. Let’s go back more than five decades, when Les Day was a child in Britain and he collected “a small british moth, called the Brimstone, in a bucket at home.” With the help of his parents, “who often drove me out into the countryside, to look for insects,” Les eventually focused on butterflies, which “continued to be the main object of my curiosity.”

Fast forward to 2007, when he emigrated Thailand’s Ko Samui island in 2007, and Les continued to concentrate on butterflies, including the male Long-banded Silverline butterfly that is the subject of this post. “It is not uncommon on Koh Samui, but usually it is found with wings closed,” he says. “The opportunity to photo the upper side of the species, particularly the more flamboyant male, does not come that often.” Members of the family Lycaenidae, or gossamer-winged butterflies, the underside of its wings are not too shabby either - a real stunner. It is thought that the eye spots near the antenna-like projections of its hindwings act as a “false head”, causing predators such as birds to attack the insect there rather than its actual noggin.

After finding most of the butterflies that resided on Ko Samui, Les “needed something else to occupy me during my daily walks in the hills away from the tourist areas.” After doing some research he realized that the Hemiptera of Thailand were not well known so he decided to shift his focus from butterflies to bugs - specifically Cercopoidea (froghoppers), which “seemed very interesting and in much need of study.”

Which leads us to iNaturalist and that motorcycle crash.

“I started using INaturalist a couple of years ago on the advice of a friend, but I only posted a few moth photos then,” says Les (above). And I will let him tell the story from here.

It took a very nasty motorcycle accident on the Thai peninsular mainland a couple of months ago for me to re-evaluate the importance of my photos. I had already been advised by researcher friends at various museums and universities around the world that many of my hemipteran photos were species new to Thailand and furthermore, there were quite a few totally undescribed species as well. Whilst stuck at home, unable to go out in the field, I realised that these photos would be lost if anything more serious should happen to me, as they were kept on my hard-drive and on my personal website, both of which would be lost after a year or so. I needed to find somewhere where they would remain available to researchers and the general public and iNaturalist came to mind, so, since I have been holed up at home recovering, I have been placing nearly all my photos on iNaturalist. I have been fortunate that some new identifications have been forthcoming from informed identifiers for which I am very grateful.

I have nearly finished posting my old photos, just about 1500 butterfly species and subspecies left from around S.E.Asia. Once finished, it will be easy to update daily findings when I am finally able to go out into the field again.

- by Tony Iwane.

- The larvae of Long-banded Silverlines are associated with ants, as seen in this video. Check out its reaction when an ant gets too close to its posterior!

- The photo of Les is was taken by Johnny Patterson, for this article.

On April 5, in conjunction with the release of the Our Planet series by Netflix, iNaturalist released a new version of Seek by iNaturalist. To heed David Attenborough’s call to action in Our Planet to protect biodiversity, we need to understand what’s here and what we might lose. Seek by iNaturalist unlocks curiosity about the natural world by giving speedy identifications with computer vision and challenging you to earn badges for finding species new-to-you.

How it works

When you open the Seek camera and point it at a living thing, the app immediately tells you what you’re looking at, even before you take a picture. This on-screen identification is tied to the tree of life, and guides you towards taking a more identifiable photo by getting more specific as you fill the frame and get the right angle or features. When the app narrows it down to species, it prompts you to take a picture, which earns you a badge and unlocks more information about the species. This “augmented reality” view of the world makes it easy to explore and interpret the natural world around you all while guiding you to take more identifiable photos.  Seek can’t always identify things to species (it’s still learning...), but it aims to provide the most precise correct name it can. Here’s some footage of it in action!

In Seek v1, which launched in March 2018 with support from HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, you needed to take a photo before you had a sense of whether or not it was even identifiable by Seek. This caused frustration when people repeatedly experienced the lack of a computer vision match. Now, since you can see predictions overlayed on the camera you get immediate feedback about what you see and the specificity with which Seek can identify it.

The species included in Seek are based entirely on photos and identifications made by the global iNaturalist community, so the Seek camera will work best in places where there is already an active community of iNaturalist users, and for species that are easily identified from photos. Seek also uses data submitted to iNaturalist to show suggestions for “species nearby,” but unlike iNaturalist, findings made with Seek will not be shared publicly, making it safe for children to use.

Seek is geared to encourage outdoor exploration of wild biodiversity (rather than pets, zoo animals, or garden plants). We hope kids, families, educators, and anyone into games will start exploring their natural surroundings with Seek, and we want this to inspire the next generation of biodiversity stewards by encouraging exploration and unlocking the names of species as a way to learn more about them. We want to make it easier for curious people who may not consider themselves naturalists to learn more about nature.

Innovations in computer vision came from research collaborations with Grant Van Horn, an Adjunct Scientist with iNaturalist. Van Horn’s dissertation research at CalTech, advised by Pietro Perona, made it possible to produce a refined dataset of iNaturalist observations, train the classification model, and export it for efficient inference on mobile devices. The computer vision model includes 15,798 species and 12,524 broader taxonomic groups (such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus). The accuracy of predictions and breadth of species included will continue to improve as the iNaturalist community and dataset grows.

How to download it

Seek is freely available on both iOS and Android. Unlike the iNaturalist mobile apps which have separate code bases for iOS and Android, we used React Native for Seek, which is a relatively new technology that allowed us to build Seek for both Android and iOS with a single codebase. It’s still nascent — there’s not even a stable 1.0.0. release yet — but we liked the benefits:

• Saves us time in development, since we’re only using one coding language.
• Brings Seek to a wider, more varied audience, since we’re able to support 7,000+ devices on Android alone — this also allows for a more international audience, since Android tends to be more popular anywhere outside of North America, Australia, and western parts of Europe.

Seek is currently translated into 7 languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Portuguese, German, and French.

This major update to Seek was made possible with support from WWF and the Our Planet series on Netflix. Seek is created by iNaturalist, which is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.

The iNaturalist community made international headlines a few weeks ago after the first hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta) seen in North America was shared and then identified via iNaturalist and some dedicated participants. It really is a great story that shows the power of collaboration and the importance of keeping an open (and optimistic!) mind, so I thought it would be fun to compile an oral (although in this case, written) history from the participants.

What follows are the lightly edited and condensed recollections of most of the people involved, put together as chronologically as possible. I have not heard back from all participants, but am happy to add your input if you message me.

Jessica Nielsen (Coal Oil Point Reserve): My first observation of the hoodwinker sunfish was on the morning of February 19th, 2019. A colleague, Mark Holmgren, and I were conducting the reserve's monthly bird monitoring survey at around 7:00 am and noticed a tall dorsal fin flopping about in the water about a hundred meters off of the point at Coal Oil Point Reserve. We weren't sure at the time what animal we were looking at as we couldn't see it very clearly in the water, but we assumed it was some kind of marine mammal based on the size of the fin and head. Later the same day, when a 7 foot long sunfish washed up on the beach, we realized that was what we had seen that morning.

I was alerted to the washed up fish by one of our UCSB student interns, Ruth Alcantara... Unfortunately, the fish was already dead but it was still a sight to see such a large and unusual fish up close. I took some measurements and photos and posted the finding to Coal Oil Point Reserve’s Facebook page.

Daniel Spach (Wilderness Youth Project): We were about to leave Devereux that day after tidepooling for a couple hours when a couple of the kids spotted what looked like a dead seal or something in an unusual posture near the beach on the rocks. When we got over there we were stunned to find something I had never seen or heard of anyone finding on a Santa Barbara beach... a Sun Fish? It was longer than I am tall, over 7 feet I'd say, super flat and roundish, with a mouth big enough to swallow my head. All the kids gathered round and were giddily excited about it, noting the shape of the fins and eyes, making guesses as to its watery demise. Everyone seemed a bit scared to touch it though, thinking it would be slimy like most decomposing fish we'd encountered but its skin was actually extremely hard, dense, and rough, like an ocean rhino or something.

Kittyhawk snapped a few pictures [TI: see above] with her phone. The kids all wanted to make sure their parents would get a copy of the pictures. Might be the only time any of us will encounter this fish for our lifetimes.

Jeff Phillips (@ljefe): My 10-year old son Pierce participates in the Wilderness Youth Project’s after school program every Wednesday. [On] Feb 22, when I met the group to pick up my son and friends at 5:30pm, they were excited about this huge fish they had found on the beach during their afternoon outing (sometime between 2 and 4:30pm). I’m a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so they knew I’d be excited about it. I had them send me the photo and with my son’s help to mark the location, I posted it on iNaturalist, originally identifying it as Mola mola. I thoroughly enjoyed the ensuing discussion among tomleeturner, rfoster, and mnyegaard.

Tom Turner (@tomleeturner): I saw [Jessica’s] post and went down there with my family, because I wanted my 4 year old son to check it out. I posted it on iNat, of course, because…that is what I do. Everyone was assuming it is a Mola mola. What happened next is a classic example of iNat at its best.

Ralph Foster (@rfoster): I have an alert for Mola spp and was checking through the day's offerings when I saw what I took to be a stranded Mola tecta. I was bewildered when I realised this was in California and not in New Zealand or Australia so I tagged Marianne [Nyegaard, who described Mola tecta], asking for her input.

Marianne Nyegaard (@mnyegaard): Ralph Foster emailed me with links to iNaturalist asking if I could see what species it was, strongly suspecting it was Mola tecta. I quickly checked and thought that the fish surely looked like a hoodwinker, but frustratingly, none of the many photos showed the clavus [TI: aka what sunfishes’ back “fin” is called] clearly. And with a fish so far out of range, I was extremely reluctant to call it a hoodwinker without clear and unambiguous evidence of its identity... I emailed Ralph and told him we needed more photographs and ideally a tissue sample, and posted on iNaturalist that his was probably just a Mola mola.

Ralph Foster: Since there were no diagnostic features shown, I also tagged the observer (@sealovelife) asking if there were more images available, which is when Tom directed me to his observation.

Tom Turner: By this time I was already out on the beach in the dark looking for the fish to get better photos, because what could be more fun than this? Alas, the tide had floated it away again.

Marianne Nyegaard: I then had a cup of coffee and doubt starting creeping in... I spent the next few hours obsessively zooming in on all the photos posted on iNaturalist... Some photos showed peoples’ hands on the sunfish, so I used their fingernails to gauge the scale and compared the skin with my archive photos. Even though the resolution just wasn't high enough to be sure, I started convincing myself the skin at least wasn't incompatible with Mola tecta and that ….perhaps it was a hoodwinker?... But I felt I needed to be absolutely 100% sure before settling on an ID, seeing I had described the hoodwinker and would need to back up my ID with absolute certainty with a specimen so far away from home.

I woke up to an email from Jessica Nielsen saying [she and Tom] were keen to go back out and find the fish again so I sent them instructions of what to look for and photograph, and then sat on the edge of my chair with all fingers and toes crossed that they would find it.

Tom Turner: At low tide (now two days later), I started biking on the beach from the east, and Jessica started walking from the west, 2 miles apart. We met in the middle, at the fish, now a few hundred yards farther east.

Jessica Nielsen: Tom and I waited for the tide to go out, found the fish...and we got to work taking the photos and fin clips requested. It really was exciting to collect the photos and samples knowing that it could potentially be such an extraordinary sighting!  Once we sent over the photos, Marianne responded very quickly.

Marianne Nyegaard: I was away from my desk most of the day, but when I checked my emails in the afternoon I literally nearly fell off my chair (which I was sitting on the edge of!). Tom and Jessica had indeed found the fish and had photographed and examined it, and taken a tissue sample. A huge amount of extremely clear photos were in my inbox and there was just no doubt of the ID. They had also examined the clavus by hand to confirm the number of ossicles, which was just brilliant. Eyes and ears and hands on the ground half a world away, wow.

Ralph Foster: If it hadn't been for Tom and Jessica's willingness to revisit and examine the specimen we would not have known with certainty that this was, indeed, Mola tecta.

Jessica Nielsen: We were all thrilled to hear the news. Mola tecta was just recently discovered in 2017 (by Marianne and her research team) so there is still so much to learn about this species. I’m so glad that we could help these researchers make the final definitive ID.

Tom Turner: iNaturalist at its best: experienced novice loops in expert who loops in the expert who then helps us learn about our find and gets info she will use in her research. And it was fun and exciting for all.

Marianne Nyegaard: Ralph Foster also alerted the University of California, who did a beach dissection and collected a large number of samples. Tissue samples will soon be on the way from California to my sister’s lab in Denmark, where I do all my sunfish genetics.

So, within 24 hours after I had first been made aware of this stranding we had confirmed the ID. I just love iNaturalist and am continuously amazed by how much fun it is to “meet” passionate people all over the world