On the night of August 26th (approximately 8 pm Pacific Daylight Time), a power outage impacted almost all of iNaturalist’s servers for several hours. iNaturalist rents servers from Microsoft Azure and the outage happened at Azure’s US West 2 data center.

As far as we can tell, no critical data was lost - that means photos, sound recordings, observations, identifications, projects, comments, and any other content uploaded to iNaturalist should all be there. You can read updates and discussion from the event on the iNaturalist Forum.

However, for anyone to be able to find all of the data, about a week’s worth of search indices needed to be rebuilt before we could bring iNaturalist back online, and that process - done almost entirely by @pleary - took about a day. Everything should be back as it was with the exception of notifications - some notifications generated in the past week may be lost, while others that you already viewed may appear again (we’re trying to err on the side of people getting them if they didn’t use iNat last week). In the next week we’ll be looking into how to prevent this situation from happening in the future. 

We want to thank the iNaturalist community for the support it's shown us; on the iNaturalist Forum, on Twitter, and elsewhere during the past two days (and every day, really). We’re humbled that iNaturalist is an important part of so many lives, and we’re deeply sorry it was down for this long, especially if it was during a crucial event you had planned. We’re looking forward to seeing what you observed during the downtime!

Our Observation of the Week is this Loasa tricolor plant, seen in Chile by @rocio-rmrz!

Currently an undergraduate biology student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Rocío Ramírez recently spent a few months in Chile for a research trip, learning forestry engineering field skills. As part of the program, they visited Canelo-Canelillo Park in Valparaiso, along the coast. 

I remember we were walking along the shoreline of the beach when someone yelled “look at the Loasa!” There were some stinging weeds that didn't seem very showy, but when I turned over the flower (which usually faces down) I saw strikingly beautiful petals with a characteristic morphology. At that moment it only occurred to me to take a photo with my cell phone because I didn't have something to position the flower for a good photo, however I knew we were going to return and I had to take a good photo there. 

We came back a few days later and a few meters from the Puyas (Puya chilensis) there was another small population of Loasa tricolor and now I was ready to take a good photo. I took out my camera and macro flash and, using a napkin, I put the flower in a better position and took several photos, trying to get a good shot of the details. Despite the napkin, I got irritated by the stinging hairs a couple of times but I think it was worth it. 

As Rocío mentioned, species in this genus have stinging hairs, similar to nettles. And in addition to being showy, the flowers are anatomically quite special.

Dr. Paulette Naulin, was the person who invited me to the field practice, mentioned that Loasa tricolor flowers are examples of hercogamy, which is the separation of male and female structures to prevent self-pollination. This is why they have such characteristic morphology.

“Since I was little, the activity I enjoyed doing the most was playing among the wild plants outside my house,” says Rocío (above, outside of Santiago), which led her to her current focus of botany.

I really didn't know what to do until a teacher mentioned in class “study what you liked to do the most when you were little because that's what you'll do for the rest of your lives,” and that's how I decided to study biology. When I was in my third semester, I studied botany and I was amazed at the vast diversity of plants, so I decided that this was what I wanted to do for life. I am currently developing my undergraduate thesis on parasitic plants of the Orobanchaceae family in Mexico, but what I like the most is finding new species of plants that I did not know in the field. Also, thanks to my boyfriend I was introduced to the world of photography, especially macro photography, which I personally like a lot because I think it highlights all the complex and curious structures of certain species.

She joined iNaturalist (“Naturalista” in Mexico) and mostly uses it to get ID help for critters and plants she comes across, and she’s learned ranges of native plants as well.

In Mexico, Naturalista has been used so that the task force members of the Natural Protected Areas can share the species they find on their usual routes, which seems to me to be a very useful tool to broaden the knowledge of biodiversity. Something similar is being applied in Chile, where they put on a small iNaturalist workshop in which the students of the group had to upload the species they encountered during field practice.

(Rocío’s text was written in Spanish. I’ve used Google Translate and lightly edited the text for clarity.)

- @diegoalmendras took a nice close-up of Loasa hairs in this observation.

- Check out other iNat observations of this stunning genus.

We’ve released a new computer vision model for iNaturalist. This is our first model update since April 2022. The iNaturalist website, mobile apps, and API are all now using this new model. Here’s what’s new and different with this change:

• It includes 60,000 taxa (up from 55,000)
• It was trained using a different approach than our previous models, which made it much faster to train

To see if a particular species is included in this model, you can look at the “About” section of its taxon page.

It’s bigger

Our previous model included 55,000 taxa and 27 million training photos. The new model was trained on over 60,000 taxa and almost 30 million training photos.

It was trained using a transfer learning strategy

During previous training runs, our strategy was to train the entire model on the dataset. This means that all of the model weights were candidates for being updated, in order to learn the most efficient and useful visual features for making suggestions for the taxa in that dataset. When training this model, we froze most of the model weights (thereby freezing the visual feature extraction) and only trained the very last layer of the model, the layer that makes the taxa suggestions. This is a machine learning strategy known as transfer learning.

One way to think about this is to imagine that someone was asked to learn all about different kinds of cars. Later, that person was asked to differentiate between two different kinds of pickup trucks, but only using distinguishing characteristics they learned from their study of cars (for example, color, size, visual shape, branding, engine size, etc), without learning anything new about pickup trucks (for example bed capacity, towing limits, etc). Chances are, that person could distinguish between most kinds of trucks without needing to learn anything new specifically about pickup trucks. They may not perform as well as someone who learned about trucks from the beginning, but they have strong foundational knowledge to draw upon for the task.

Our new model was trained using a transfer learning strategy. We used the internal weights and visual features from our previous model which was trained on 55,000 taxa. The advantage of this approach is that we didn’t need to learn all of those internal model weights and visual features again, so training was quite a bit faster. It’s only been four months since our last model was released, which is the shortest time between model releases so far.

As with the pickup truck analogy, it could be that this model trained with the transfer learning approach is slightly less accurate overall than if we had trained the entire model again. However, in our testing this new model appears to achieve nearly the same accuracy as the previous model while containing more taxa. Our plan going forward will be to spend the time fully training a model about once a year to maximize accuracy with new photos and taxa, and to use the faster transfer learning approach in between full training runs so we can release models more frequently than we have in the past.

Future work

First, we are still working on new approaches to improve suggestions by combining visual similarity and geographic nearness. We still can’t share anything concrete, but we are getting closer.

Second, we’re still working to compress these newer models for on-device use. The in-camera suggestions in Seek continue to use the older model from March 2020.

We couldn't do it without you

Thank you to everyone in the iNaturalist community who makes this work possible! Sometimes the computer vision suggestions feel like magic, but it’s truly not possible without people. None of this would work without the millions of people who have shared their observations and the knowledgeable experts who have added identifications.

In addition to adding observations and identifications, here are other ways you can help:

• Share your Machine Learning knowledge: iNaturalist’s computer vision features wouldn’t be possible without learning from many colleagues in the machine learning community. If you have machine learning expertise, these are two great ways to help:
• Participate in the annual iNaturalist challenges: Our collaborators Grant Van Horn and Oisin Mac Aodha continue to run machine learning challenges with iNaturalist data as part of the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference. By participating you can help us all learn new techniques for improving these models.
• Start building your own model with the iNaturalist data now: If you can’t wait for the next CVPR conference, thanks to the Amazon Open Data Program you can start downloading iNaturalist data to train your own models now. Please share with us what you’ve learned by contributing to iNaturalist on Github.
• Donate to iNaturalist: For the rest of us, you can help by donating! Your donations help offset the substantial staff and infrastructure costs associated with training, evaluating, and deploying model updates. Thank you for your support!

Our Observation of the Week is this Spiny Moleroman (Genus Chelypus), seen in South Africa by @rachel\_grace!

“I remember when visiting Kruger [National Park] we stopped for a long line of Processionary Moth caterpillars crossing the road, which other cars passing by didn't seem to understand,” recalls Rachel Scharf, describing a family trip. “I'd love for people to notice the smaller animals as much as the bigger ones too.”

Well, on a visit to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in April, that’s exactly what Rachel and her companions did!

When we saw this Spiny Moleroman in the Kalahari we were just leaving the Kalahari Tented Camp where we had stayed the night. It was midday and quite hot. As animal sightings are sometimes scarce in the Kgalagadi park, we've come to appreciate the smaller sightings a lot more. So when we noticed a strange something running across the dirt road, we wanted a closer look. We had never seen anything like it! That's why we enjoy coming back to visit the Kgalagadi because every time it's a different experience! After we spotted this strange creature on the move we then noticed every bird in the grass and trees nearby had noticed it too and they really wanted the tasty fast food this creature was for lunch.

Since we wanted to know what it was we didn't want it to get eaten! So we chased off the birds so we could look at it and take the shot, and then safely escorted this creature to the cover of the long grass it was trying to get to.

Like other members of the arachnid order Solifugae, spiny moleromans are not venomous nor do they make silk. They use their relatively large chelicerae (or mouthparts) for grabbing and cutting prey, such as small arthropods or vertebrates. Species in genus Chelypus have specially adapted feet for digging, and like other solifugids can run quite quickly. And while they can deliver a painful bite, they’re not considered medically significant to humans.

Rachel (above, at Professor Anne Rasa's Meerkat Sanctuary) credits her mother for cultivating her childhood interest in nature, and explains that this was rekindled during the pandemic. “All that free time I had gave me the opportunity to reconnect with my love of nature even if just in my garden,” she explains and with the Caterpillar Rearing Group in Africa she starting rearing the lepidopterans in her backyard.

Because I love rearing caterpillars so much, it has opened my eyes to so much more. It led me to discovering iNaturalist and interacting with nature and the people in its community. As I would look for caterpillars and I'd find other weird and wonderful creatures I had no idea about!

I love using iNaturalist to ID all the strange creatures I come across from caterpillars to mammals to this Spiny Moleroman! It really helps me to get out of my comfort zone of Lepidoptera which I enjoy observing and helping to identify the most. The iNaturalist community of other people around the world who love nature and who are always willing to help is really wonderful! Being able to use my phone's camera for all of my observations makes it really accessible for anyone who wants to take part. I really enjoy sharing, exploring and learning with others about God's beautiful creation! :)

- Solifugids are known by many common names in English, such as wind scorpions, sun spiders, and camel spiders. Though they are arachnids, they are neither spiders nor scorpions.

- Check out some of the other cool solifugids on iNat!

- Arachnologist Dr. Paula Cushing goes over some solifugid facts during an interview with Emily Graslie in this episode of The Brain Scoop.

Our Observation of the Week is the first Protoglomeris vasconia pill millipede posted to iNat! Seen in France by @ldvn. 

Ludivine Lamare, a twenty-one year-old French biology student who identifies as a transgender woman, grew up tidepooling and insect hunting and has always had an interest in nature. First marine life, and now terrestrial arthropods.

I've only started photographing the world around me in the middle of the Covid lockdown in summer 2020. Back then, I wouldn't even think about picking up photography as a hobby and yet... I started using iNaturalist pretty much at the same time, focusing on “easier” targets such as odonates. Today, my two biggest interests are harvestmen (Opiliones) and spiders.

Last month, Ludivine journeyed from her current base in Limoges, France, to the French Pyrenees mountains and went looking for harvestmen. After scouting a tunnel when she arrived, she returned to it at night, looking for Ischyropsalis luteipes and Sabacon.

Unfortunately I didn't find any, but while prospecting, amidst the countless Meta menardi and Nesticus cellulanus watching me from every angle, I saw an unusual pill millipede which first struck me by how big it was (by European pill millipedes standards I must add).

But no matter how strong my arachnid fever may be, I never turn down a nice millipede. I was frankly quite surprised later on when I found that it was the first observation of this (rather conspicuous) species on the site, though some others already existed elsewhere on forums and databases. Especially as it wasn't very hard to ID.

As you might suspect from their common name, pill millipedes are millipedes that can roll up into a defensive ball shape, much like pill woodlice (which are isopods). “It feels like pill millipedes and Myriapoda as a whole suffer from a lack of representation. Because even though Protoglomeris vasconica may have a relatively narrow distribution, it doesn't seem to be particularly rare nor well hidden when it is present.” Like many other millipedes, they’re detritivores and can exude a gnarly fluid when threatened. 

“When I started using iNaturalist two years ago, it was merely a way for me to have my personal gallery of ‘things I observed,’” says Ludivine, “but now I find it a very engaging way to generate data.”

I like how I am able to share valuable illustration photos of overlooked species, and how accessible those documents can be to any other naturalist worldwide, experts and hobbyists alike. Going forward, I'd love to continue documenting “the forgotten ones” now that I'll soon have access to my own stereomicroscope. And I plan on starting speleology at some point. Some very interesting harvestmen are entirely troglobitic and I'd love to help shed light on those even a tiny bit. This specimen of Ischyropsalis pyrenaea, for example, was the culminating point of my vacation, and the first record on iNaturalist as well!

For now I've been talking mostly as someone who posts observations on here but since I also started helping with IDs, I must say conversing with experts and enthusiasts is very convenient on iNaturalist. And while I did most of the learning on other sites and forums, it has been a really good starting point. Encouraging more people to help with IDs and care about the quality of the data is important especially in the context of citizen-science projects like this where ID mistakes are to be expected.

- As Ludivine hinted at, European pill millipedes (as well as others in the northern hemisphere) are relatively small compared to pill millipedes in the southern hemisphere. About four years ago, one of those giant pill millipedes was an Observation of the Week!

- Here’s a short video with some pill millipede facts.

This is the twelfth in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist. 

“Seashells have amazing shapes and colors,” says Susan Hewitt (@susanhewitt). “It is an exaggeration, but I say that all of the mysteries of the universe are embodied in the spiral designs of seashells, so with enough study and meditation, you could understand everything!”

Born and raised in Kent, England, Susan says she fell in love with seashells and land-snail shells during her family’s yearly summer trips to North Devon. “I think my mother put up with boxes of shells in my room, because they were not too heavy, they were not dirty, and the contents would not escape and run around the house.”

She and her family often visited Charles Darwin’s house, which was a few miles away.

As a little kid I did not understand why Darwin was so important, but when I got old enough to read about his discoveries, I was delighted. The theory of evolution by natural selection unlocked all of biology and nature in the same way that atomic structure and the periodic table of the elements unlocked chemistry.

And in elementary school, each classroom had a “nature table”, where students could leave natural objects they found. 

When people ask me, I explain that I did not “become” interested in nature at some point, instead I was born interested in nature. As soon as I was big enough to walk by myself, I would go out and pick up anything natural that caught my eye and bring it home — rocks, pine cones, wildflowers, bugs — it was all great to me. William Healey Dall, who was a superb 19th century malacologist, said, “Naturalists are born not made” and I agree with him.

While living in Southern California in her early twenties, Susan’s interest in seashells became more serious, and she wrote some small papers about them. And in her thirties she says “I was super fortunate that I got to become friends with the late E.O. Wilson when I worked for two years at Harvard in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.” She’s now written 58 papers, which can be found on ResearchGate and on Wikipedia.

She first heard about iNat in 2014, when she led a mollusk search during a bioblitz at the New York Botanical Garden.  “I am interested in all mollusks of every kind, from every kind of habitat,” says Susan, “and when I first joined iNaturalist in 2014, I spent almost all of my time looking at mollusk observations and ID-ing as many of them as I could.” In the past eight years or so she’s since added IDs to about 120,000 verifiable observations, and is one of the top identifiers of mollusk observations on iNat!

I love to help people whenever I can by putting IDs on their observations because what is the point of amassing valuable knowledge if you don’t share it with others? I am in my 70s, and I think that is my job now, to help teach other people what I have learned.

Not only does Susan add IDs, she often includes helpful and encouraging comments along with those identifications and has written a detailed guide to observing mollusks on her iNat profile, which I definitely encourage everyone to check out. Here are some basic tips:

With snail shells try to get three views including a view looking directly at the aperture. With bivalves, please photograph the inside as well as the outside. Often we need a scale object to be included so we know how big the shell is.

When choosing a dead empty shell to photograph, if possible try to make sure the shell is in good condition: not broken, not chipped, and not too bleached-out by the sun.

Susan’s observation count is almost on par with her identification count, and she makes observations pretty much every day, whether in her current home city of New York or her annual trips to Florida, the Caribbean and Southern California. 

I use iNat on a daily basis and try to record all of wild nature that I come across. iNat has helped me learn so much more about every aspect of nature, and I have met and become friends with many really great local naturalists through iNat too.

I make daily observations using the app on my iPhone. I put at least a rough ID on while I am coming back from being out, or once I get home. Then I upload all my obs and the next morning I go though all the obs again, often trying to improve the IDs. I do have quite a lot of field guides, but I have to say I mostly use the resources on iNat itself.  And also I google to help me find out more about some species.

(The photos of Susan are by Sylvia van Leeuwen, and were taken during a Dutch marine biology expedition to the Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius in 2015.)

- Susan is also an active Wikipedia contributor and a few years ago they featured her in a video about the Love dart article she co-wrote. 

- An Associated Press article about iNat from 2018 included an interview with Susan.

- Check out a recent paper about using iNat as a tool for studying mollusks in Brazil. 

- You can also beach comb for sea beans, as a recent Observation of the Week post detailed.

Our Observation of the Week is this leaf insect nymph (likely in the Genus Cryptophyllium), seen in Singapore by @hadoe!

Doreen Foo and her family (husband Eugene and daughter Fybie) have been volunteering with Singapore’s National Parks Board since 2016.

Starting from intertidal surveys, we also volunteered in various community science programs such as Heron Watch, Butterfly Watch, Dragonfly Watch, Garden Bird Survey, Monitor Lizard Survey, BioBlitz, Turtle Watch (Beach Patrol) and Outreach Patrol to educate proper intertidal etiquettes too! After learning that Singapore has such a rich biodiversity, we are inspired to promote conservation activities and help contribute towards scientific research as volunteers on a long term basis.

As part of slowing down and observing more when outside, Doreen became interested in moths  but wasn’t able to find good local ID resources until she found out about iNat and started using it. She soon began to upload more observations from her outings and has contributed nearly 3,500 so far.

When Covid hit in 2020 and most of us were in a lockdown stage where travelling was prohibited, I grew to “develop a macro fever” (and this is my latest hobby). I was so intrigued to explore more using the macro mode of my mobile phone and then proceeded to use a selfie stick with an additional clip-on lens, I went on to explore the various nature parks in Singapore. This Cryptophyllium was found in Thomson Nature park on a sea hibiscus (Talipariti tiliaceum) plant on 9th July, it was a lucky find as it was still at eye level so I was happily snapping a few record shots as it was my first time seeing this nymph!

Leaf insects comprise Family Phylliidae, which is nested in Order Phasmida (commonly known as stick insects), and they range from South Asia into Australia. Like other members of their order, they’re herbivorous and often incredibly well camouflaged like the nymph Doreen photographed. When moving they often rock back and forth, simulating plants shaking in the wind. 

Doreen (above) tells me 

iNaturalist is very convenient to use and the “view suggestions” feature is so convenient! I have been sharing with people around me about this app. For example, whenever I volunteer at intertidal outreach, I would suggest to the beach goers instead of picking up sea creatures, it is better to take a picture, use the app and upload their findings, find out what it is, plus you can contribute to natural science research too! For me, I am truly grateful for all the identifiers who have helped correct the wrongful tags. In fact, over the years, I have since become friends with other observers from Singapore! Being able to connect with like-minded people who love nature and are selfless in sharing their knowledge, there is no wonder the first app I open every morning when I wake up is iNat!!

(Photo of Doreen by Fiora Lee)

- Check out a National Parks Board written piece and video about Doreen and her family.

- There just over 450 observations of leaf insects on iNat and they are pretty darn cool, take a look!

- Deep Look, as usual, put together a nice video about leaf insects. 

Our Observation of the Week is this Yellowspotted Scorpionfish (Sebastapistes cyanostigma), seen in Guam by @motu\_vaeoso!

As a child in American Samoa, Motusaga Vaeoso says that nature documentaries were what first interested in wildlife. “I felt like an explorer as I watched the lions in Africa hunt as a team or humpback whales engage in an incredible feeding behavior called bubble-net feeding,” she says. “Nature fascinated me, and I was always curious to know what was in my environment.” 

The ocean “has been a constant in my life, and I want to do my part to protect it,” she tells me, so Motu has been studying coral reef ecosystems for years now, “and learning about how coral reef fisheries change over time because of local and global impacts.” After participating in the Quantitative Underwater Ecological Surveying Techniques (QUEST) program, she became the first American Samoan appointed as a NOAA Coral Reef Fellow for American Samoa.

Now a graduate student studying marine science at the University of Guam, Motu has been conducting coral reef surveys in Asan Beach Park, which is part of the War in the Pacific National Historical Park, and that’s where she spotted the colorful scorpionfish you see above.

I habitually carry my underwater camera with me because you never know what you may stumble on. Since I saw the Sebatapistes cyanostigma, my eyes are used to finding them now, I showed our monitoring team how to find them, and we have found more than 20.

The yellowspotted scorpionfish is a widespread species, ranging from the Red Sea into the Pacific Ocean. Averaging a few inches in length, these fish also sport toxic spines which can be medically significant for humans. Like other scorpionfish, they are ambush predators that hunt smaller invertebrates and fish at night. During the day they hide among the coral, like the one seen here.

Motu (above) joined iNat less than two months ago and plans to post her archive of nature photos to the site. She says 

I started using iNaturalist to help with my fish identification skills, but I realized that it has a lot of practical applications. I used to take many field photos and then store them on my hard drive or google drive, never using them again until I needed to look up a specific photo. With iNaturalist, I realize that I can put my photos (including the old ones) to good use by uploading them to iNaturalist to create a temporal, spatial, and taxonomic coverage record of my field photos. iNaturalist has made me more aware of nature, and I am taking notice of other marine species such as gobies and algae. As a result, I constantly find different things to learn about in the marine world.

(Photo of Motu by Natasha Ripley)

-  You can check out Motu’s research here, and follow her on Instagram!

- Motu wrote a blog post about her reef monitoring work in Guam and abotu iNat a few weeks ago, check it out!

- In this video interview, Motu and her sister Valentine discuss their work educating and inspiring students in in American Samoa. 

- iNatter @vetea\_liao also studies corals in the Pacific, and his Parribacus holthuisi slipper lobster was a past Observation of the Week!

Our Observation of the Week is this bug-on-bug predation, seen in the United States by @denisewill!

“Like so many other iNat users I’ve been fascinated by insects since childhood,” says Denise Williams, a biology teacher who grew up on a farm in Virginia. Now living in North Carolina, she tells me she has a native plant garden and started it mostly to attract insects. 

I spend a great deal of time around my house photographing arthropods of all kinds that come to my plants. My principal interests rotate every few years. For the last several years, my main focus has been on bees and wasps, but I was already starting to take more interest in hemipterans, especially the leafhoppers and stink bugs. After this observation, my interest has grown even more.

While looking for bees to photograph in her yard, Denise noticed the bug duo photographed above.

At the time, I assumed they were different instars of the brown marmorated stink bug with the younger, smaller one simply standing behind the older, larger one. Brown marmorated stink bugs are a drab brown as adults, but they are quite colorful when they hatch, so they can appear as different species as they progress through their molts. They are also so common here that I might have ignored them both, but I went ahead and snapped a few photos thinking I could at least document the stink bugs in my yard. It wasn’t until I downloaded the photos that I could see the proboscis of the smaller bug had pierced the larger one and the larger one was in the process of being consumed!

I still assumed the smaller bug was a brown marmorated stink bug, and that maybe I had just captured a case of cannibalism, so I posted the photo on iNat with that ID. @trisha24 verified the larger bug as a brown marmorated stink bug and identified the smaller one as a species of Podisus, another common stink bug in my area, but one that is predatory rather than plant-eating. Another user, @lupoli\_roland, pointed out that the discoloration of the larger bug was due to it being digested.

Bugs (Order Hemiptera) have proboscis that is used for sucking. Many bugs, like the brown marmorated stink bug, use theirs to ingest plant liquids, but there are quite a few species (such as the predatory stink bug here) that slurp up the innards of other animals.

Native to Asia, brown marmorated stinkbugs have become a noted agricultural pest in North America and other places where they have been introduced. A generalist when it comes to feeding, they’ve caused tens of millions of US dollars worth of damage to crops in the past few decades.

Denise (above) really got into iNat after participating in a bumblebee project in 2018, and she quickly realized it was a great tool for helping her learn. 

I’ve learned so much about my local flora and fauna because of it and I’ve become a better and more focused observer…

Without iNaturalist, I might not have bothered to take the photograph of these insects, I might not have had access to these experts who could identify the insects in my photo and explain what was happening, and I certainly would not have fully appreciated what I got the chance to observe.

- New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz wrote an entertaining piece about brown marmorated stink bugs for the magazine back in 2018.

- Here’s an informative video about predatory stink bugs. 

Our Observation of the Week is this passionflower, (likely Passiflora cristalina), seen in Brazil by @flsantos! 

“I grew up in a small town and had a lot of contact with nature,” says Fábio Luis dos Santos. After studying insects in college, he now works at the Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso (UNEMAT Alta Floresta campus) and at the Escola Estadual 19 de Maio, and tells me “Today my interests are moths and butterflies, as well as questions about basic education and college education.”

And it was while leading a gastropod-focused outing with students that Fábio found the flower you see photographed here. 

As soon as we arrived at the trail, I asked the students to observe all the organisms in the place and the red flower that was in front of them. However, nobody took a picture.. As I guided the activity, I went back and forth along the trails and didn't have time to take a picture, but on the tenth attempt, while the activity was working perfectly, I finally managed to photograph the flower.

Interesting that being an urban area, I told them about other very nice records nearby...for example, this snail.

Passiflora cristalina was described just over eleven years ago, and not too much is known about it. There are only eleven observations of the species on iNat, and Fábio has made four of them. There are over 500 species in the genus, and they not only provide a lot of fodder for pollinators, their fruits and leaves are food sources for many other animals (including humans). 

Fábio (above) has been an iNat user for nearly three years now, and credits it for helping his students during the COVID pandemic 

as a way to encourage [them] to go out and observe nature without an agglomeration of people…And it's as fun as playing Pokemon Go (laughs).

It's been a way of discovering that even the most abundant, common species that inhabit our homes can still carry many questions that can only be answered with massive data sets.

It has also been a form of continuing education, considering that each record, when approaching a taxonomic category in the determinations, presents us with unique opportunities for learning.

(Photo of Fábio by Sabrina Raisa dos Santos. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- You can find Fábio and his work on ORCID.

- Passionflowers are kind of amazing, check out their diversity on iNat!

Speaking of snails, take a look a this recent paper that analyzed iNat snail observations in Brazil!