Our Observation of the Week is this Acanthaspis fuscinervis assassin bug, seen in China by @jishenwang!

I can’t speak for everyone, but I usually relax for a bit after finishing dinner. Entomology PhD candidate Ji-shen Wang and his family, who live in the Yunnan province of China, go outside for a run after their evening meal (“a family tradition”) and come across incredible insects.

 “On our way back home,” he recounts, “my mom shouted with a great curiosity: ‘What? Is this a moving ball made of soil?’ 

Luckily I know this is an assassin bug nymph, which covers itself with debris and corpses of its victims as camouflage. The next day, I went to the same place and photographed some more bugs. When I show my mom and dad my macro photos of the adult (see below) and immature bugs, they could hardly believe their own eyes. "This ball of soil has legs and antennae!" my mom said. “No way this little soil ball would become a stinging bug like this!” my dad said.

The Reduviidae family, also known as the assassin bugs, are a group of predatory “true bugs”, and like other bugs (Order Hemiptera) have mouth parts adapted to piercing and sucking. Many of the bugs we commonly see, like aphids, hoppers and cicadas, tap into plants and slurp up their juices, but as you might expect, assassin bugs dine on other animals. 

Unlike many other familiar insects such as flies and beetles, bugs undergo “incomplete” metamorphosis, and grow through a nymphal stage  rather than a larval stage, which more closely resembles the final adult stage. And as Ji-Shen noted above, the nymphs of Acanthaspis fuscinervis excrete a sticky substance which they use to attach dirt and dead ants (not the bodies of any other prey) onto their bodies. Joseph Stromberg of Smithsonian Magazine writes that researchers studied the efficacy of this camouflage with jumping spiders, a common predator, and found that “[the[ spiders attacked the naked bugs roughly ten times more often than the masked ones.” So it seems pretty effective! 

Growing up in a very biodiverse area, Ji-Shen (above, photographed by his mom) was always interested in nature but says he was “obsessed” by insects and over the last six years has been researching the Panorpidae family, commonly known as scorpionflies, as a PhD candidate in the Entomological Museum, Northwest A&F University, Shaanxi Province of China. 

Ji-Shen has been on iNat for just over five years, and he tells me

iNaturalist benefits me in two ways: 1) I can share my observations with people around the world, and quickly know what species I am recording; 2) I can find a lot of useful information through other people’s observations. For example, a new distributional record of a species, a never-reported interesting behavior, and vivid colors of a living scorpionfly, which are obscured in the museum specimens. iNaturalist is actually a very beneficial companion to my personal life and scientific works! I usually spend at least half an hour on iNat each day to share my observations and check other's interesting posts.

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- Ji-Shen started a scorpionfly project on iNat.

- And you can take a look at his research publications here.

- Lacewing larvae also encrust themselves with debris and carcasses.

- Assassin  bugs are pretty cool, here are the 50k+ Reduviidae obserations on iNat!

With so many people facing restricted activity for days or weeks or months due to the covid-19/coronavirus/SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, here are some suggestions for how you can still engage with nature and connect with others through iNaturalist while in or around your home.

Add Identifications

Help add IDs to other people’s observations! The Identify page is the best tool to use when doing this (you'll need to be signed in).

Here are written instructions and below is a short tutorial video for the Identify page. You can filter by taxon, place, and other criteria, then use keyboard shortcuts to quickly go through observations and add IDs, comments, or mark observations as captive/cultivated. Please only add IDs to the level which you can independently verify.

Add Annotations

If you don’t feel comfortable adding IDs, you can use the Identify page to add annotations to observations. There’s a tutorial for this on the iNaturalist Community Forum, as well as some helpful links to get you started. If you’re unsure about a specific observation, don’t feel obligated to add an annotation, feel free to move to the next one. :-)

Make Observations At Home

Make observations in your home and add them to the Never Home Alone project, or get to know your neighborhood nature by observing sidewalk weeds, birds, and local insects and spiders. (Don’t forget to obscure the observation’s location if you don’t want your home location publicly visible on your observations.)

Try Seek With Your Kids!

Have kids? They can use our kid-friendly and privacy-focused Seek by iNaturalist app to explore and earn badges for finding common species!

Upload Old Photos

If you have an archive of your old nature photos, add them to iNat! Instructions for our web uploader can be found here, and a tutorial video here. Below is a video interview with iNat super user @greglasley, who’s done just that.

Learn How to Use iNat in the Classroom

If you’re an educator and need to teach remotely, consider using iNaturalist, but please make sure you’re familiar with the platform and have carefully read the Teacher’s Guide before using it with your students. They don’t even have to make observations, they can use our Explore page to explore and download data to work with. We’ve also started a thread on the iNaturalist Community Forum for educators using iNat remotely.

Help Translate

Ok, it's not really exploring nature, but if you speak English and another language, translating our website and apps into that other language helps speakers of that language enormously. Our software has been partially translated into 68 languages by over 100 volunteers, but text is always changing, so there's always translation work to do.

Share Your Ideas!

Our most active community members have compiled an even longer list of great ways you can get involved with iNat from home. If you have other ideas, share them in the comments below. Please stay safe and healthy, and do your part to protect others in your community by limiting in-person interactions, washing your hands frequently, and other recommended precautions.

Our Observation of the Week is this group of Malesherbia tocopillana plants, seen in Chile by @juanmauricio2!

“The deserts are some of the best landscapes on earth for adventure,” says Juan Mauricio Contreras, a wildlife guide and amateur naturalist in Chile who, it’s safe to say, likes the desert. “Wonderful hikes show us the beauty of the desert. They rarely cease to impress, and reveal the desert’s most intimate secrets.”

The Atacama Desert, which lies along the western side of South America, is one of the driest places on Earth and is home to many relict and edemic species, including the incredible Malesherbia tocopillana plants you see above. Juan came upon the plants while exploring with Caminantes del Desierto (“Desert Walkers”), an NGO.

[Malesherbia tocopillana] grows mainly in the gorges of Tocopilla on slopes with an angle greater than 45º. They’re quite difficult to climb, given the stony and steep slope of the terrain. It is an impressive species, different from everything I had seen in the desert...It is located in an extremely fragile environment. This area is characterized by flora and fauna of strong endemism and primitivism of the relict type.

A small genus (it contains about 27 species), Malesherbia is a member of the Passifloraceae, or passionfruit family, most of which live in tropical regions and not deserts. In fact, Malesherbia tocopillana looks to have colonized this region of the Atacama only within the last two million years, which is about 6 million years after the climate of the area became hyperarid. (Guerrero, et al., 2013) [PDF] Seeing these incredible flowers growing out of the pile of rocks here is pretty extraordinary.

Juan Mauricio (above), says that his explorations of the desert and other regions of Chile have led him to write a scientific note about Liolaemuslizards, and he is cooperation with research on other taxa, including bees, birds, and other reptiles. He started using eBird for his bird sightings and posting his photos of other taxa to social media until someone encouraged him to use iNat. Now, he tells me,

[I’m] uploading everything I observe and can photograph. This allows me to increase my vision and knowledge and learn how species interact with each other in an ecosystem. I can communicate with other specialists of different species, and increase my knowledge of the biodiversity of nature.

• Juan Mauricio posts on Twitter. Check out his tweet<.a> showing how many endemic animals were found inside a discarded beer bottle in the Atacama.
• Malesherbia is quite a picturesque genus, take a look at the 50+ observations of this genus on iNat!

Our Observation of the Week is this male New Zealand Giraffe Weevil, seen in New Zealand by @lisa\_bennett!

Like Babe Ruth, Lisa Bennett called her shot on February 11th. “Every summer I have been keeping an eye out for [New Zealand giraffe weevils], but so far I hadn’t seen any,” she tells me. “[And] I did mention to my husband in the morning that maybe today would be the day!” 

Imagine my delight when I saw this one on the very tree we were picnicking under! My oldest son happily held it for the photo, and gently put it back on the trunk of the tree afterwards. We also saw many stick insects that day, as well as freshwater crayfish, cicadas, birds and even a gecko skin. I love seeing the fascinated look on their faces when we find things, and I love that they learn to be respectful and gentle, and to return them to their home if they have been handled.

The longest species in the Brentidae, or straight-snouted weevil family, the New Zealand giraffe weevil is highly sexually dimorphic, with adult males reaching up to about 90mm in length and adult females about 50mm in length - the main difference being the exaggerated length of the male’s rostrum. After emerging as adults in the summer, females drill holes in the wood of dead or dying trees, where they will eventually lay a single egg, and “during this time males will compete fiercely for access to females for copulation, using their greatly elongated rostrum and enlarged mandibles to push, bite, pull and grapple other males from the female, occasionally throwing their opponent off the tree.” (Painting and Holwell, 2013) Interestingly, larvae eat fungi which grow in their burrow, not the wood itself.

Lisa says she “was especially animal-obsessed as a kid,” and in addition to nature books she collected nests, shells, and other natural emphera. “My parents didn’t really understand my interest but they encouraged it,” she remembers, “which I’ll always be grateful for, although my father drew the line at pet frogs singing in my bedroom!” A stay-at-home mom, she enjoys introducing her sons to the flora and fauna around their abode. “My eldest son especially enjoys finding ‘species’,” she says. “It blows my mind that we find a species new to us almost every time we go exploring.”

For years Lisa (above, with her sons) has been trying to record the biodiversity of their 13 acre property but says “my spreadsheets weren’t cutting it” and it was difficult to find identification resources. iNaturalist has been a boon in both of those areas, and she tells me “to have such a wonderful way of recording all the data and having such expert knowledge just a click away is amazing!...

I love the way it has made me notice so much more that I ever did before, and I feel when I visit a place now I understand it, biologically at least, much more than I ever did before. I wish it had been around 30 years ago! I’m making up for lost time now though! :)

- by Tony Iwane

- smaller males will sometime sneak in and mate with a female, as this really informative video shows.

- female New Zealand giraffe weevils have much shorter rostra.

- this is not the first giraffe weevil Observation of the Week! Back in 2016, we featured @nlblock’s observation of a giraffe weevil in Madagascar!

iNat user @agonzalo photographed a Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth giving birth in Panama, and it’s our Observation of the Week!

“The story of the picture of the sloth giving birth is based on applying a basic equation,” explains Aitor Gonzalo. “perseverance plus extreme LUCK!

I didn't see the full delivery. I heard a loud screech that caught my attention and managed to see the sloth at a distance of about 150 meters. Through the camera I could see that the mother was manipulating the newborn but at the moment everything was very confusing for me. In the photos you can understand better what was happening.

While his primary interest is birds, Aitor says “I never miss the chance to photograph sloths, monkeys, and other animals, alone or in company with their babies. Obviously, a birth in nature is to win the lottery.”

Famously slow-moving, three-toed sloths eat leaves and digest them at a sarlacc-like rate, sometimes taking 2 weeks to digest a meal! Sleeping in trees for about 16 hours a day, they make their way to the forest floor only once every 7-8 days in order to defecate, and as you can see they even give birth up in the treetops. Newborn sloths, like the one in Aitor’s photos, gestated for about seven months. It will spend the next five months or so clinging to its mother before it starts to climb on its own in earnest.

Aitor has always been interested in nature, but he credits his two daughters, Milena and Costanza, for his current “real real true passion for nature (I mean me as an already old guy and eager to go out and spend most day taking photographs).” One daughter has a PhD (earned in France) and studies soil microbes, while the other is studying Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning at UC-Davis in California. “Both of my daughters…

are passionate about nature, the environment, and its conservation and have discussed it with so much enthusiasm that it is extremely difficult not to get engaged. Moreover, both have been vegetarians for many years, and to challenge them and myself, I became vegan.

A regular iNat and eBird user, Aitor (above, with @ruthpierson and @claryliz) finds iNaturalist to be “an essential tool. It has everything. It helps you identify animals, it keeps records of everything, you can get statistics, it is interactive and user friendly. Besides, it is fun and challenging.”

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- Panama is part of the iNaturalist network!

- Sloths do swim - here is a pygmy three-toed sloth making its way across the water to look for a mate.

Our Observation of the Week is the first Microglossum clavatum posted to iNaturalist! Seen in Italy by @salvatore\_bacciu\_paola\_mereu!

“We fell in love with Geoglossaceae [earth tongue fungi] last year and we investigated many species that were very little known in Sardinia,” says Salvatore Bacciu, one half of @salvatore\_bacciu\_paola\_mereu, whose main passion is macrofungi. The couple live on the island, “in a beautiful highland in the middle of the Mediterranean basin where nature is still very raw and beautiful,” as he describes it. “We are a couple in love with nature who fight to preserve as much as we can.”

The gorgeous Microglossum clavatum fungus you see photographed above is one of several new species in that genus described in 2017. Not only did Savaltore and Paola find the fungus, they sent samples of it to their mycologist friend Matteo Carbone, who verified their ID with some DNA testing. The genus Microglossum is actually *not* listed under Geoglossaceae on iNaturalist (although they are morphologically similar), but in the family Leotiaceae. Like other members of its family, this fungus is saprotrophic, and is usually found in soil, duff, and moss. 

“When the result came back we were very excited and wanted to share it with the world through this very useful app,” Salvatore (with Paola, above) tells me. “iNaturalist is without a doubt a brilliant tool to share the knowledge of the natural world. Since we started using it, we make the most of it having the opinion of very skilled scientists and amateurs like us.”

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- Interested in mushrooming and adding your fungus observations to iNat? Check out our Introduction to Mushrooming video for some pointers!

Our Observation of the Week is this awesome Red-lined Bubble Snail, seen off of Australia by @belairjo! 

Sure, this blog post is about a marine snail, but the observer became interested in nature photography when photographing a bird. “When zooming in for a photograph of a Kookaburra in my garden,” recalls Joanne Zerafa. “I loved being able to see the finer details and felt a sense of connection to the animal, as if I could experience the world from their perspective.” 

Joanne spends much of her current nature photography time participating in citizen science, “tracking the presence of species, particularly the east coast population of Australian Grey Nurse Sharks who are critically endangered.” Individual sharks can be identified by their markings, so getting photos of them is really helpful. 

She came across the snail you see above while on a dive with Feet First Dive, and it was spotted by divemaster Casey Hambrecht. “[This species] is a favourite in our region,” says Joanne. “You’d think that their neon mantle would make them easy to find, but due to their small size, it takes a keen observer to find them.”

Recognizable by that distinctive lined shell and the large, blue-outlined margin of its foot (and don’t forget that pair of black eye spots!), the red-lined bubble snail ranges throughout the Indo-Pacific region and is generally found in intertidal areas, but can be found subtidally. It is believed to feed mainly on polychaete worms.

Joanne (above, on a dive), tells me “I love how iNaturalist facilitates the research that citizen scientists carry out via their photography. Our observations are logged, species identified by scientists and enthusiasts and added to projects for further research. 

iNaturalist has transformed the way I feel about the changing climate. Instead of feeling helpless, I feel like I am contributing to the provision of knowledge that could assist with establishing policies and protections that environments will need for their survival.

- by Tony Iwane

- Slugs and snails rasp away at their food with their radula. Check out plate 3 here for some SEM images of a Red-lined Bubble Snail’s crazy radula.

- A Red-lined Bubble Snail makes its way across some algae in this video.

Our Observation of the Week is this colorful pair: an Alpheus rapacida snapping shrimp and a Slender Shrimpgoby, seen off of Greece by @rpillon!

“Since I was a child I have loved the sea and, simply, snorkeling,” says Roberto Pillon, an Italian underwater naturalist and photographer. “The bottom of the sea is still a space where nature is the protagonist.” He’s especially interested in fish and echinoderms, and while not a professional researcher, he tells me “Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting and collaborating with the leading experts in the sector...a simple nature enthusiast today can change our knowledge of nature.”

Last year, Roberto “wandered between the archaeological sites of ancient Greece, [where] I discovered a corner that seemed to be the Red Sea, with a very particular bay full of life…

In this bay, under the eyes of hundreds of people who dive every day, the seabed was littered with fishes and sea urchins never seen before in Greece. Observing live the relationship and collaboration between two such different animals [as those photographed above] is enchanting.

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the once separate ecosystems of the Mediterranean and Red Seas met , and since then organisms native to one sea have moved to the other. Most move from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, a process called Lessepsian migration. The slender shrimpgoby (also known as Mertens’ prawn-goby), is native to the Red Sea and the Indo-Pacific region, and was first discovered in the Mediterranean in 2008, off of Turkey - likely due to Lessepsian migration, but it could have also traveled in the ballast of ships. Roberto’s photo here represents the first record of it in Greece’s waters, as well as the furthest west it has ever been recorded in the Mediterranean.

As its common name suggests, this fish partners up with shrimp (in the Snapping Shrimp family), and they form a mutualistic relationship. The shrimp builds and maintains a burrow in which the goby can hide, and the goby keeps watch for predators that might sneak up on the shrimp, which has poor eyesight. Scott Michael wrote an in-depth article about this pairing, and he says “when [the shrimp] leaves the burrow it keeps in contact with the vigilant Goby. It does this by placing one of its antennae on the fish. (This antennal contact is the critical line of communication between the two animals.)” The species of shrimp in the photo, by the way, is also a migrant from the Red Sea.

Roberto (above) says that “for me, iNaturalist is a companion that reminds me of my underwater world in the very long periods in which I have to live outside my habitat.”

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been edited for clarity.

- You can read a published record of this observation in Mediterranean Marine Science (see page 648). [PDF]

- David Attenborough narrates this video about the relationship between goby and shrimp.

Our Observation of the Week is this owlfly larva and its jumping spider prey, seen in Cambodia by @geechartier! 

“I have been interested in nature for as long as I can remember but it tended to take a back seat until I started visiting Cambodia in early 2007,” says Gerard Chartier, who eventually moved the country in 2009. Since his move to Cambodia, he’s been studying the region’s flora and fauna, starting with lepidoptera, then moving on to odonata, and “with the help of experts, who I now call friends, and online forums I started to make some progress.” Now, he tells me, “I decided some time ago that I would rather not focus on any particular types of fauna or flora but, instead, focus on cataloguing as much as I can of the species living in the fairly small area where I guide nature tours.”

It was while leading a nature tour that Gerard captured the photos seen in this post, first noticing only the spider. 

As usual, I took photos from different angles. As I came round to the lateral view, I noticed that the spider was hanging from something so I focused in on that and found the jaws of the owlfly larva. Then I took more photos of the larva, which was so well camouflaged in the nook of the branches of the plant. There is no way I would have seen the owlfly larva had the spider not been there. The customers I was guiding were amazed!

Ambush predators, the larvae of owlflies (members of the order Neuroptera, along with antlions, lacewings, and others.) lay in wait for prey to come near enough for the owlfly to snag it with its pretty fearsome mandibles. Once captured, Neuropteran larvae  “inject toxic secretions as regurgitants into prey in order to paralyze and to kill it.” (Dettner, 2015; thanks for finding this article for me, @eddiebug!). After metamorphosing, the adult owlfly looks similar to odonata and the adults of other neuroptera, with four wings and much reduced mouthparts. 

Jumping spiders, like the Telamonia dimidiata capture here, are found throughout much of the world, and use their large front-facing eyes to seek out prey, which they pounce on by using a pretty phenomenal jumping technique. This spider’s eyes, however, did not seem to take note of the owlfly.

Gerard (above, discussing a Nepenthes kampotiana pitcher plant) has made quite a few friends via various online grouypswas encouraged to post his photos to iNaturalist by @hkmoths, and he’s now uploaded over 1,400 moth observations to iNat, as well as observations of other flora and fauna.

I have my own website that shows the full set of things I have identified so far but I see there is a risk that the data I have been recording could be lost...and I see iNaturalist as the ideal, public repository for that data. I still have a huge backlog of observations to add to iNaturalist based on 50,000+ nature photos, but still adding new ones all the time.

- by Tony Iwane. Photo of Gerard copyright Jason MacDonald, used with permission.

- Gerard found a new species of bug outside his house several years ago, recently described and named Sogana chartieri! (See the observation here.)

- The late macro photographer Andreas Kay shot some beautiful footage of an owlfly larva encountering an ant.

Our Observation of the Week is this Iberian tadpole shrimp, seen in Spain by @mario\_mairal!

“I am an evolutionary biologist and naturalist,” says Mario Mairal, who is originally from Spain but is currently a researcher with Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “I am working with different topics related to biodiversity and evolution [and] I am especially focused on the biogeography of sub-Antarctic islands and African sky-islands, extinctions as drivers of biogeographical patterns, or the loss of dispersal on island hypothesis.”

Mario’s research and interests have led him on expeditions in the Canary Islands, Magascar, Northern Africa, the Galápagos Islands, and of course his home country of Spain, where he came across the tadpole shrimp you see pictured above.

“In March 2014, along with other young passionate friends of nature, we decided to make a weekend trip to visit a forestry guardian friend in a rural region of Spain (Piedrabuena, Ciudad Real),” he recalls.

My friend is an expert in the area and it was the perfect time to photograph daffodils, amphibians and Eurasian otters. When we were looking for amphibians near a pond, we found suddenly a great abundance of Triops.

Triops is one of two genera in the family Triopsidae, commonly known as “tadpole shrimp” in English. While it is a crustacean, this omnivorous creature is not a shrimp and is definitely not a tadpole, although its silhouette resembles that of larval anurans. These creatures tend to live in temporary ponds, and their eggs can tolerate long periods of dry conditions, hatching only when the pond’s water has returned.  

Mario (above, in South Africa) of course focuses on research, but also tells me, “I am especially interested in the dissemination of science. As a scientist I find that dissemination should be an obligatory task.” He released photos for free use on his website, and joined both iNaturalist and Instagram as well, “because I think that nowadays is imperative to arouse curiosity, educate in conservation and warning about the current biodiversity crisis.”

Although he only joined iNaturalist this past July, Mario says that “I have quickly learned many things which, before using iNaturalist, I would have spent hours looking up in other publications. I am impressed by the power of collective consciousness.” But he also hopes to use it for his research:

For example, I am especially interested in distribution patterns and processes that model biodiversity, and I am sure that iNaturalist is helping me to understand these patterns better. And with this information I can establish a hypothesis to unravel the evolutionary processes. Now I am studying historical distribution patterns because of climate change, and iNaturalist has deeply inspired me several times.

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- In addition to photography and biology, Mario is also a magician, and you can see some clips of him performing here.

- Triops longicaudatus eggs are often sold in kits for people to raise at home. This video has some nice close up footage of one swimming.