Our Observation of the Week is this Mediterranean Burnet (Sanguisorba verrucosa, مرقئة ثؤلولية in Arabic), seen in Lebanon by @ramymaalouf!

A Lebanese-Spanish field naturalist currently residing in Bucharest, Romania, Ramy Maalouf says that as a child in Lebanon he would collect fossils and minerals in the mountains, but

my curiosity and excitement about botany and entomology started later on when I  moved to Algeria thanks to a friend, Emilio Esteban-Infantes, who was also living there at the time. It was also when I decided to start the photographic documentation of all my encounters in nature and learn more and more about the taxonomy of plants.

Ramy has moved around for much of his adult life and says “I decided to accustom myself to every country I visit through its nature and plants,”

During the lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, I developed my page Flora & Fauna, where I post all my discoveries and make them accessible to everyone. I found myself with a huge database of more than 15,000 photos (of more than 2,000 species) of plants, insects, animals and landscapes from five different regions and countries: Lebanon, Galicia/Spain, North East Algeria, Romania and Al Ula/Saudi Arabia. It took me around 14 months to upload the database on the website. It soon became my window to the world and my way of presenting my observations.

Two of those photos are the ones you see here, when Ramy was on Mount Bakish at an altitude of about 1,600 m. “The name Bakish comes from the Bacchus (Dionysus),” he explains, “the god of wine and vegetation in Greek mythology. It was called that way because of the red soil that resembles the wine color.”

Members of the rose family, Mediterranean burnets are reddish-purplish when in bloom, and those flowers eventually turn into the fruits you see in Ramy’s photo. 

Ramy (above) tells me he’s currently working on three projects:

• the flora of Mount Sannine, Lebanon
• the flora of Al Ula, Saudi Arabia

• the fossil records preserved in Amber that are found in two new sites
  that my father - Mounir Maalouf - and I discovered in Lebanon two years
  ago, with the guidance of the renowned paleoentemologists Dany Azar and
  Sibelle Maksoud.
  

But he’s continuing to upload his photos to iNat, which he first heard about from his friend @abounabat. “Since then,” says Ramy,

my experience and interaction with enthusiasts and professionals scaled up and with it my way of conceiving the world around me. It also helped me orient my work and my research in the field based on what others are finding around me. Having a community that is so active encouraged me to dig deeper and pay more attention to the natural environment around me. I am happy and proud to be part of your community.

- You can follow Ramy on Instagram and Flickr.

- Burnets range throughout much of the northern hemisphere, check out the most-faved ones here!

Our Observation of the Week is this Ropalidia distigma paper wasp nest being raided by a Large Hive Beetle (Oplostomus fuligineus). Seen by @lemoncul in Malawi.

After growing up in Luxembourg, Marc Henrion (@lemoncul) moved to London for university and postdoc training, then to New York for a postdoc position. While he always had an interested in nature, Marc tells me “it really took off when I moved to the US and discovered the national parks with their impressive wildlife and the realisation that I would need a much better camera.”

After moving to Malawi a few years later, he says

[I] was blown away by the birdlife, though I had to learn a lot. I work in international public health research, but luckily my office mate [@markusgmeiner] was active on iNaturalist and got me hooked into systematically logging my observations and helping with IDs. I am always interested in large mammals, but birds really are my passion. Reptiles, amphibians and insects are a bonus when out and about but not my main interest.

And we’re lucky Marc is interested in non-bird wildlife, otherwise we might not have gotten a look at the tableau you see above. It’s actually due to his forgetting his binoculars at home before heading out to Majete Wildlife Reserve in southern Malawi a few weeks ago. “So,” he says,

instead of looking for birds, leopards and wild dogs, I decided to have a more entomologically focused weekend as I could use my phone camera to record observations that way - a phone is not ideal for birdwatching... So in the evening I walked around the campsite with a flashlight and my phone. I then spotted the beetle stuck in a wasp nest on one of the shower blocks. I wondered what the beetle was doing there, and thought it had been the victim of the wasps. Only after posting it on iNaturalist and the beetle being ID'ed (by @opolasek and @beetledude) did I find out that the beetle was the parasite in this situation - really cool when you learn something new.

I reached out to Ozren (@opolasek) for more information about this interaction, and he told me

The observation by lemoncul shows a real problem for a wasp colony, a hive chafer. These coleopterans can raid wasp colonies and cause a substantial loss of larvae and destruction of the nest. However, in all observations on iNaturalist, the wasps do not mount a reaction or try to defend the brood. This is very interesting, but we are unaware why the wasps do not react. The chafer may use chemical signals to pacify the wasps, and one of the wasps in this photo seems to lick the chafer. 

Adults of this species (which also raid honey bee hives), eat, meet, and mate on nests, after which the female will lay her eggs in mammal dung. Larvae eat and pupate within the dung, emerging as adults on the prowl for hymenopteran nests.

The wasp species, Ropalidia distigma, is one of the most common in the area, says Ozren, and makes nests containing about 50 adults, often on trees or human structures. A citizen scientist with a “keen interest in the family Vespidae,” Ozren has been working with others on a revision of African Ropalidia. 

Notably, [Ropalidia distigma] will soon change the name, and it will become Ropalidia puncta, a taxonomic change that will resolve nearly 218 years of confusion of one type specimen described by Fabricius in 1804. This finding is a part of the large revision of this genus, where five colleagues helped produce a revision of African species. The study described 33 new African species and included 528 documented observations of these wasps collected on iNaturalist website. This study was recently accepted for publication by the journal Zootaxa.

Marc (above, second from right), tells me he uses iNaturalist for three main reasons:

1. Logging my observations - for my own records and for contributing to research.

2. Finding out what I've seen -- I learned a lot about species that I had no idea what they were when I recorded them and getting the online community to identify them.

3. A bit of friendly competition to see who is the top observer in Malawi (though @markusgmeiner will be difficult to overtake...) ;-)

(Photo by Oliver Pearse (@opearse), taken in Nsanje, Malawi. From left to right: Innocent Chapo, a local community leader; Alic, a forestry department ranger; Alex (@globalorthop); Innocent's son Hassan who was our guide; Marc (@lemoncul); and Markus (@markusgmeiner).)

- A paper based on GBIF data (which included iNaturalist observations) made a model to predict the spread of large hive beetles, and you can read it here! Also includes some pretty interesting information about their behavior and effect on honey bee hives.

- Ozren and some colleagues recently described a new speices of Ropalidia, and their investigation was spurred by this observation by @happyasacupcake. The paper will soon be published in Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

Our Observation of the Day is this Angelina rufescens fungus, seen in the United States by @huafang!

“I grew up in countryside in Taiwan,” says Huafang Su. “Memories of my childhood revolve around climbing trees, running in bamboo forest, catching all kind of insects and other small animals, etc. Nature was always there for me to explore.”

Now a grandmother and living in the state of Michigan, Huafang has slowly been reintroducing herself to nature. 

I spent time learning about birds, frogs, butterflies, wildflowers, and trees, but I was not particularly passionate about them until I met fungi. Maybe because fungi are ephemeral, maybe because they are unpredictable, or maybe because they are difficult to study, fungi get my attention. Mushroomers constantly find species that are new to science, new to one’s area, or new to oneself. I especially like to find new-to-me species. I enjoy the quiet and suspenseful hunt in the woods. I love the delight of serendipity again and again. I don’t have any training in science, however I’ll keep on learning so I can understand more about fungi. Fungi will be a life-long learning for me.

And back in 2020 one of those “new-to-me” species was Angelina rufescens, which is when Huafang saw her first one. 

It was nothing special at the first glance until I zoomed in to take photos of it. Its elongated ascomata [fruiting bodies] were so distinctive with the split-open look and adorned with light-color margin. With so many fungi being unknown, it’s very common to come across a fungus that cannot be easily identified in the available field guides. However, some fungi are easy to identify if we manage to find out the information about them. Angelina rufescens is one of them. It’s the only species in the genus, it produces distinctive ascomata that regrow on the same wood annually and on its dead ascomata of previous fruiting.

She’s since seen it two more times, including the one photographed above, which she saw in November of last year.

A member of the Michigan Mushroom Hunters Club (MMHC), Huafang (above) has been heading their FunDis project since 2017. “We learned the value of citizen science through participating in the project,” she says,

[and] we now collect the specimens, document the specimens with photos, voucher the specimens, sequence some of the specimens if fund is available, and deposit the collections to the University of Michigan Herbarium (UMICH). iNaturalist, in this regard, is one of the best platforms for citizen scientists of every experience level to document their finds and communicate with other enthusiastic citizen scientists.

Mycology is a field to which citizen scientists can make significant contributions. Many mushrooms still await classification. I will keep on doing the part I enjoy the most – walking in the woods and documenting the fungi I find.

- Angelina rufescens is a member of Class Leotiomycetes, which are quite beautiful and different from the standard “mushroom” we usually think of when we think of fungi. Check out the most-faved ones on iNat!

- There have, of course, been several Observations of the Week about fungus observations, including a Clavaria by @thiago\_mouzinho and this zygote fungus growing on a millipede by @hazelsnail!

Our Observation of the Week is this Caspian Monitor (Varanus griseus caspius), seen in Iran by @hossein\_nabizadeh!

“As a child, I was always looking for reptiles in my grandfather's garden,” recalls Dr. Hossein Nabizadeh, a biologist at Razi University.

and [people’s] fear of reptiles made me do more research on them. For this reason, I started studying biology, and my research for my master's degree focused on the systematics and ecology of the lizards in the Maranjab Desert in Iran. This made me focus entirely on the taxonomy, ecology, and protection of reptiles. Iran has a high variety of reptiles and has the strangest snake in the world called the spider-tailed horned viper.

Hossein has been studying Iranian reptiles for years now with an International Herpetology team, and in 2017, on a research trip to central Iran, he and his fellow herpetologists came across the Caspian monitor you see here. It’s one of two Varanus griseus subspecies known in Iran (the other being the grey monitor), and “[in the caspius] subspecies, the transverse bands on the dorsal region are reddish-brown and the tail is dark with 13 to 19 transverse bands at the end of the tail (usually one-third of the tail)...

Monitor lizards have bifurcated tongues, drooping eyelids, strong, well-developed limbs, long, strong tails, and large, sharp teeth, and they can be seen in most desert areas of the Iranian plateau. The largest lizards in Iran and the world belong to the Varanidae family.

Currently working on descriptions of new lizard species from Iran (to be published soon), Hossein (above), a member of the Institute of Herpetology Research at the Central Iranian Plateau, joined iNat last June and his posted most of his photos of Iranian reptiles here, in order to help them be seen by others. “I do photography as an amateur,” he says, “and I use most of these photos for my research.”

(Some quotes have been lightly edited)

- Look closely at the second photo of this monitor lizard and you’ll notice how close its nostrils are to its eyes - a trait of this species.

- Take a gander at the beauty of Iran’s reptilian residents on iNat!

- Check out two previous Observations of the Week from Iran: @parham\_beyhaghi’s Lorestan Newt, and @shahrzadasa’s Bongardia chrysogonum.

Our Observation of the Week is the first Parribacus holthuisi slipper lobster posted to iNat! Seen in French Polynesia by @vetea\_liao.

“I've been fascinated by nature, in particular in marine biology, since my childhood when I learned how to spearfish with my father,” says Vetea Liao, who grew up in Tahiti. 

I had to learn the local names of the fishes and understand their behavior. And then later during my studies I learned about the whole reef ecosystem and the classification system and I was even more fascinated. For one of my first jobs, I participated in a massive biological inventory on the island of Moorea, the Biocode Project, and was amazed by all the little organisms that we found and I was able to talk to many taxonomists. This experience definitely hooked me!

During one of his forays into the ocean, Vetea witnessed daytime spawning by the coral species Porites rus (below), which he says is unusual because most corals spawn at night. After more investigations into this behavior, he found it was quite predictable, so “with few friends we were able to confirm that this spawning for this coral species was synchronous over two different islands, within a few minutes [of time]. Then we decided to start a small scale citizen science project to explore the spatial scale of this synchrony and found that it happened at the same time on seven different islands separated by 500 km.”

In 2021 they created the Tama No Te Tairoto (“Children of the Lagoon”) association to scale up the project even further and in 2021 found simultaneous spawning over ten different islands. “We are a group of young marine biologists,” he explains. “most of us are amateur photographers and we also use our photos to show our followers the wonders of our lagoon and rare or intriguing marine species.”

Slipper lobsters like Parribacus holthuisi are, of course one of those intriguing marine species, and Vetea says the one shown above was found when the group went night snorkeling.

I invited a few [members] to the lagoon where I grew up but I hadn't been there myself in a few years. Unfortunately the general environment of this area has been degraded and overfished but two years ago some regulations on fishing were implemented. I was interested to see if there was any visible impact on the fish population, and fortunately while snorkeling we saw this beautiful slipper lobster that was different from the usual one (Parribacus antarticus). I posted it on iNaturalist because I saw that there was no picture of Parribacus holthuisi.

More closely related to spiny lobsters than “true” lobsters (Family Nephropidae), slipper lobsters (Family Scyllaridae) have distinctive flattened antennae, which Vetea captured so well in his photo. They live in warmer waters around the world where they dwell on the seafloor and eat mollusks, worms, and other invertebrates. They’re edible but haven’t been the target of large scale commercial fishing. Parribacus holthuisi grow to about 14 cm in total length. 

Currently working with Direction des ressources marines for the local government in Tahiti, Vetea (above) used to work in Moorea for the Gump research station (run by UC Berkeley) and for the CRIOBE research station (French CNRS). And of course in his free time serves as president of Tama No Te Tairoto. The group uses Google tools for their work, but Veta says “when I discovered Inaturalist, the tools and the community associated, I was impressed.”

I use iNaturalist to reach out to a wider community of specialists. We do have a few local guide books for underwater organisms but there are still some species to discover or to identify. And when local specialists can't identify something to the species level, the iNaturalist community is a very useful resource.

(Photo of Vetea by Anne-marie Trinh. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- Vetea and his group haven’t published their findings yet, they’ll be turning to it after the observation season is over. He tells me they hope to make an international call for further study of this behavior.

- There are, of course, videos of coral spawning, here’s one from PBS Nature.

- Take a look at the diversity of slipper lobsters on iNat!

Matt Muir, Chris Mallory, and BJ Stacey in Arizona, 2017. Photo by Scott Loarie.

It is with a heavy heart that I report the death of BJ Stacey. Most of us on iNat knew him as finatic, a tireless observer and identifier, and one of iNat's most prolific users. While I corresponded with him quite a bit over the years, we only met in person a few times, always in the desert. I remember my first impression in Anza-Borrego was, "Wow, this is a big dude." He was a big dude, big enough to comfortably carry two SLRs on belt holsters (macro and telephoto, of course), like some kind of naturalist gunslinger. But his generosity with his time and expertise was just as expansive. That part of the desert was one of his regular stomping grounds, so he was able to show us a bunch of spots we wouldn't have checked out otherwise.

BJ and Jay Keller also organized an amazing trip to southeast Arizona later that year. I was only there for the tail end of it, but again BJ's generosity, unflappability, and wry sense of humor were on full display. Everyone I’ve ever spoken with about BJ has stressed those qualities.

It would be remiss of me not to mention his many contributions to science, including research on leopard frogs, terrestrial gastropods, and, of course, Amplaria staceyi, a species of millipede named in his honor in 2021.

BJ had been battling a serious illness for several years. His condition declined suddenly last week and he passed away peacefully Thursday afternoon with his wife Michaeleen by his side. He added over 100,000 identifications on iNat helping over 17,000 people all around the world and was one of iNat's most active observers since joining way back in 2012 when iNat was much smaller, so it's not too much of a stretch to say that if you use iNat, you probably benefited from BJ's work. Once, Scott even went so far as to define a "finatic" as a unit of measurement for expressing large quantities of observations, 1 "finatic" equalling 52,656 observations at the time.

I'll miss BJ (I never got to get his thrash metal recommendations!), and I know many of you will too. Please share your memories of him in the comments, or, if you wish, you can make a donation in his honor at the memorial iNat fundraising page Michaeleen and Jay have set up. iNat meant a lot to BJ, and one of his final wishes was to again promote and support this community of people who share the abiding love he had for nature.

Our Observation of the Week is this Prickly Blue Poppy (Meconopsis horridula), seen in Nepal by @suresh\_ghimire.

Professor Suresh Ghimire tells me he was born in the Tarai region of Nepal, and

The western Tarai region of Nepal at that time was densely forested, impenetrable and teeming with flora and fauna; but in the1970s, the then His Majesty’s Government of Nepal implemented a resettlement program for people coming from mountains. My father was one of the employees of the program in western Tarai, where we witnessed the pristine forests, the diversity of flora and fauna, and the ways how forests were later cleared for human settlement. I was also greatly inspired by my father who was very passionate about nature, particularly interested in birds and mammals. He was also a great storyteller who wrote poems portraying love and affections about nature.

Studying biology while at university, Suresh “studied plant population ecology and ethnoecology, with a dissertation on harvesting practices and conservation ecology of Himalayan medicinal plants” for his PhD and is currently a professor at the Central Department of Botany at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. He continues to collaborate with traditional Tibetan doctors, known as amchi, and recently published a book “documenting 570 species of medicinal plants used in Tibetan medicine (or Sowa Rigpa) practiced in Nepal.”

So fittingly, the plant documented in this week’s observation is used in traditional medicine, and was seen by Suresh way back in 1999. Working as a botanist for the People and Plants Initiative in collaboration with WWF Nepal and local communities, he studied medicinal plants and traditional ecological knowledge. “Out of about 300 medicinal plant species that we documented, Meconopsis horridula (locally known as ajak tserngön) was one of the most important,” he says, “highly preferred by the amchi for treating bone disorders, fractures, and also in lung and bile disorders.” 

This species is restricted to relatively high elevation in the area, mostly over 4300 m. We had to cross high passes in order to find its better population for ecological study. I discussed with amchi Tengyal Zangpo [above, with Suresh] and village head Chupur Baiji about the possibility of their participation in the field trip. In late June 1999, with their consent, we decided to cross one of the challenging mountain passes of this area, known as ‘Kagmara La’ (5115 m). This pass lies in a traditional trade route. After three days camping in and around the pass, we came across a very intact population in a steep rocky and scree slope, just within 200 m distance from the pass. We were so happy to find a good population of Meconopsis horridula for sampling. There were also other fascinating alpine species, with high medicinal value, including Saussurea gossipiphora and Nardostachys jatamansi. However, I had already exhausted my film and battery so I could take only a few pictures of these plants. Unfortunately, after a few years, Mr. Chupur Baiji who participated in our 1999 field trip slipped over on the ice near the slope where we took this photograph and died while crossing the pass. I'd like to pay tribute to him for his great help and support.

Prickly blue poppies range from Nepal into China and Myanmar, and according to Suresh they’re “particularly common to the north of the main Himalayan range and in rain-shadow areas. There has been concern in a few places in the northern districts of Nepal where it is occasionally harvested for trade across the northern border to feed the growing Tibetan medicinal industries. However, there is a lack of study to quantify this trade and about the status of its populations across the country.”

A member of iNat since 2019, Suresh (above) tells me

I found iNaturalist to be the best platform for sharing my observations to the world and learning those of others. It makes it easy to network with experts in different fields and may provide opportunities for future collaboration. I am particularly fascinated with plant observations from the Himalayan region shared in this platform, which give me the opportunity to learn about species that I had never seen before. I am also glad to help identify those I am very familiar with. In the course of my field studies, in the central and eastern Himalayas, I have accumulated thousands of plant photographs, many of which are not yet identified. I use iNaturalist not only to share those observations but also use it for future identification.

(Some quotes lightly edited for clarity. Photo of Suresh and Tengyal Zangpo by Chupur Baiji. Photo of Suresh by Bandana Awasthi. )

- You can read Suresh’s entire book about ethnobotany in Nepal for free on Resarch Gate, and also see his other research there as well.

- Check out other beautiful specimens of the genus Meconopsis on iNat!

Our Observation of the Week is this Guatemala Neckband Snake (Scaphiodontophis annulatus), seen in Mexico by @perlachuc!

Last February, a few of Perla Chuc’s friends from Mexico City and Chiapas came to visit her in the Mexican state of Tabasco, near the Guatemalan border. “We planned a field trip to the municipality of Macuspana to try and photograph whatever we could find,” she says.

After walking for a while my companion Leo spotted something moving through the vegetation and saw the Scaphiodontophis annulatus snake. We just had the right time to photograph it, and I only had my cell phone, but I still took one photo. It’s a spectacular species, just too beautiful. It was a good day, my friends and I were satisfied and happy with this new personal record.

While Guatemalan neckband snakes do occur in Guatemala, they obviously range elsewhere and can be found from southern Mexico into Colombia, often in forest leaf litter. They prey mostly on ground skinks (Scincella sp.) as well as other lizards and sometimes frogs, but one was recently observed dining on a Tantilla moesta snake. 

A nature lover since she was a child, Perla (above, with her first salamander) is a biologist with a particular interest in amphibians and other herpetofauna. She’s hoping to study them further while going for a postgraduate degree.

As for iNat, she tells me she’s known about it for a few years

and I used it to confirm records and species distribution or occasional identifications, but I had no real interest in uploading photos. It wasn’t until some friends started using it that I was actually encouraged to do so as well. I created my account and started to upload all the photos I was able to capture from previous years. Yes I was late to iNat, but using the app is now part of my day. Most of all I like to review herpetofauna and see what is new in this group. I love seeing how people get interested in uploading photos, identifying them,  and knowing more about a particular species once they get an identification. This makes us care about the world around us and the living things we share the planet with.

(Perla’s answers were translated from Spanish by @aztekium_tutor and have been lightly edited for clarity. Photo of Perla by Leonardo Ponce.)

- Check out the pattern variability of Guatemalan Neckband Snakes on iNat! 

Our Observation of the Week is the only Phlox pattersonii observation on iNaturalist! Seen in Mexico by @manuelnevarez.

One of the cool (but sometimes frustrating!) things about iNat is that you never know when your observation will finally get that species ID! Well, it took five years for Dr. Manuel Nevárez de los Reyes’s observation to get there, and here’s the story.

In May of 2016, Manuel Nevárez was working towards his PhD in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Wildlife Management and Sustainable Development at Autonomous University of Nuevo León. Research for his doctoral thesis - Herpetofauna of the Sierra de Gomas in the North of Nuevo León - took him, as you would expect, to the Sierra de Gomas mountains. In addition to reptiles and amphibians, Manuel is interested in plants and other organisms so he photographed the plant you see above and posted it to iNat. Some IDs were added by the community, but last year @grahamayer added an ID of Phlox pattersonii and this ID was confirmed a few months ago by @alan\_prather, who described the species back in 1994, making it the first and still only observation of this plant on iNaturalist!

I reached out to Alan about this plant, and he told me it’s the very first plant species he described, which he did while working on his PhD. “I had been poking around in Phlox from Mexico when one day I came into the herbarium and found a specimen of Phlox on my desk,” he recalls. 

A fellow student had collected it from the same canyon where this observation was made and left a note asking me to identify it because he couldn’t figure out what species it was. I knew immediately that it wasn’t a species known from Mexico, and after poking around I found a few other specimens of this species that had either been mis-identified, or just filed away without an identification. So I compared it to other North American Phlox to be sure it wasn’t a disjunct population of a species from Texas or Arizona and I was able to describe it as a new species.

I’ve been there to collect it myself, and I have to say that it’s a beautiful area. The town of Bustamante is lovely, folks are friendly, and the Grutas de Bustamante are fascinating. And the area is full of cool plants like Pinguicula bustamanta and Poliomintha bustamanta…

My favorite thing about iNaturalist is how anyone can make really special observations (in this case, anyone being a vertebrate biologist who has come to appreciate the beauty of plants).

As for Manuel (above), he’s currently working for an environmental consultancy, sampling flora and fauna and preparing environmental impact reports. He’s described not only a species of lizard (Gerrhonotus lazcanoi), but also several plants, including Pinguicula bustamanta  - discovered around the same time and area as his Phlox pattersonii observation - and Astrophytum caput-medusae (with @aztekium_tutor).

“For me,” says Manuel, “the use of iNaturalist is a way to learn from other fields of biology that are not my specialty. Photographing and identifying what I find in the field is a habit that I acquired a long time ago and has allowed me to learn a lot.”

- There are nearly 57,000 observations of plants in the genus Phlox on iNat, check out the most-faved ones!

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

Currently at the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, Roman Romanov tells me 

It seems to me it is quite usual to be interested in nature being a child [and] this is my story too. I remember when I was a child sitting near a body of water, viewing small and not so small creatures visible in water like larvae of mosquitoes and chironomids, different aquatic plants etc. My first sighting of Hydrocharis morsus-ranae was truly amazing, and it happened when I was less than ten. I took it to my home and placed it in water for better viewing, but, sadly, this plant disappeared during the night because my parents were not thrilled with it as I was.

Thankfully Roman was not discouraged and continued to pursue his interest in aquatic plant life (and protists), which he brought to iNaturalist in 2018. “I found iNaturalist accidentally,” he says, “because I searched for images of charophytes around the world.” 

[iNaturalist] is essential for my research. [It allows me to view] many images of the same species taken at different seasons, from different habitats etc. It also allows me to test and polish my opinion about concepts for some species.

In the nearly four years since he joined iNat, Roman has identified over 34,000 observations from around the world, many of which document less commonly-observed aquatic life, often photographed via microscopes.

I prefer to apply keystone taxonomic works for ID in combination with recent papers, the number of which are growing like an avalanche. It allows me to help with IDs as well as test myself. Outstanding records of rarely reported species are not infrequent here because of continuous additions of observations from around the world.

Roman’s current focus is integrative taxonomy of macroscopic algae, including “their distribution in time and space, and protection issues.” While charophytes (which he’s holding in the photo above) are his favorites, he keeps up with other algae and protists. “I think I could be named ‘plantwatcher’,” he says, “because I like viewing plants as well as many aquatic inhabitants.”

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- Take a look at Roman’s research here. 

- There are so many remarkable images among the most-faved observations which Roman has identified. Check them out!