iNat user @nanorca13 took this amazing photo of a merlin harassing a bald eagle in Canada and it’s our Observation of the Week!

Sorry for the holiday-induced delay, folks, but Observation of the Week is back for 2019!

Although he’s always been interested in nature, “from spending summers on the farm in southern Saskatchewan when I was a kid with the pronghorn and coyotes to trips to the beach here on Vancouver Island,” Warren Cronan says “I literally got into my obsession about six years ago when I injured myself running trails up the mountain. So because I couldn't run I grabbed my little camera and started hiking and taking pictures.”

As his interest in photography grew, Warren upgraded his gear and began posting his photos to iNaturalist in 2015.

Birding has become my main focus of interest and the merlin observation and pictures with the eagle happened while I was looking off the back deck of my parents’ house. This was not the first time I've seen a merlin chasing an eagle here in the middle of Nanaimo...I believe the eagle got too close to the the trees where the merlins had a nest and were spending the summer. I kept taking pictures of the eagle until the merlins finally chased him off...I got some great pictures of the eagle and a few with a merlin in the pic with him. I'm glad others have enjoyed it.

A type of falcon, the merlin is a small - wingspan about 50–73 cm (20–29 in) - but quick and aggressive bird that often hunts other birds on the wing and is known for fiercely defending its territory from other raptors. Pete Dunne, in his Hawks in Flight (with David Sibley and Clay Sutton), writes “An observer may use this aggressive tendency for identification purposes and as a means of detection. High-flying merlins often betray themselves and distinguish themselves because they are vigorously harassing another raptor (even ones as large as the Golden Eagle).” Merlins are found throughout both Eurasia and North America.

“I almost always have my camera handy and ready no matter where I am,” says Warren (above, with said camera), “and my ability to track birds in flight has improved considerably over the last few years.” He uses iNaturalist as a place to organize and share his observations, as well as get ID help from other users, but says “as much as I get out of posting my observations and following others, it is being out in nature observing that I live for, and capturing an interesting shot is just icing on the cake.”

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

- Here’s some great footage of a merlin hunting and feeding its chicks.

- And this osprey nest cam video of an attacking bald eagle shows you exactly why birds don’t want bald eagles around their young. This video may be difficult to watch for some.

- Falcons and eagles may look and behave similarly, but they are only distantly related if you delve into their genes. Falcons are in fact much more closely related to parrots.

A Mexican free-tailed bat is a snack item for a great egret - it’s our Observation of the Week! Seen in the United States by @kempo63.

“I've been out photographing birds every weekend, dragging my wife and granddaughter all over the California central valley to most of the Wildlife Preserves and refuges. I absolutely love finding and photographing new species (to me) of birds, and sending copies of them to my mother to enjoy,” says Richard Morgan. Originally from Pennsylvania, he says “I've started taking bird photography serious about a year ago when my Dad passed. I bought my first DSLR camera to take back to Pennsylvania (I live in California) to take photos of friends and family, and when I returned I wanted to make use of the camera, so I photographed my first backyard bird, and haven't looked back since then.”

It was on a trip to the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area where Richard took the above photograph, and he almost didn’t make it in time. "That was just plain luck I suppose.

My wife, granddaughter, and I were just pulling in the gate at The Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area outside of Sacramento, when I spotted the egret on my left side, grabbed the camera with a 500mm lens (heavy!) and shot a few photos with one arm, through the driver side window. I knew that it had something in its bill, but didn't see that it was a bat until after I had the car stopped and reviewed the photos. That was awesome!

Egrets are generalist predators and often devour fish, reptiles, amphibians, and (non-flying) mammals such as rodents, so bats are not the first type of prey which come to mind when you think about this bird. How, then, did this bat find itself in the beak of one? Well, as iNaturalist user @fogartyf points out in a comment on the observation, the nearby Yolo Causeway is home to hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats, the largest roost in California. Bats skim over pond and lake surfaces to get a drink and it’s likely this one somehow ended up in the water, making it an easy snag (although perhaps not so easy meal) for the egret.

I don’t think many of us often think of bats as food items for other animals, so I reached out to Jakob Fahr (@jakob), who started the AfriBats project on iNaturalist, to see what he had to say on the subject. Jakob tells me that there are the usual suspects such as raptors, snakes, and mammals such as civets and genets (Viverridae) and mustelids, and notes that some predators such as the bat hawk and bat falcon specialize in bat predation. Also, “fascinating are bats preying on other bats, for instance Nycteris grandis in Africa, Macroderma gigas in Australia, and Vampyrum spectrum in the Neotropics.” Jakob also notes that other animals such as amphibians, insects, and yes, herons and egrets, have also been seen preying on these flying mammals.

“I've been using iNaturalist to help with bird IDs since I'm relatively new to birding. (No one wants to get called out for posting the wrong bird id, right?),” says Richard (above). “Someone made a comment on one of my posts that I should submit the photos to iNaturalist, and I've decided to make a commitment to myself to submit observations and photos of each bird that I've photographed each weekend.”

 - by Tony Iwane

- In addition to iNat, Richard posts his photos to Instagram.

- Have you ever wanted to see a giant centipede catch a bat? Well, thanks to the BBC, now you can.

- One more nice video about the Yolo Bypass bats because why not?

It's that time of year again, when everyone everywhere feels the need to summarize the past 12 months with a bunch of excruciating charts and graphs. What? You don't do this? Huh. Well we do. And if you're not the chart-making type yourself, we can make some for you too.

So, what can we say about this tangle of lines and rectangles? For one thing, we had kind of a big year. We passed 15 million verifiable observations in December, after hitting 14 million in October. It took us 6.5 years just to reach our first million observations, and we just did the same in a little over a month. We're growing quickly. What amazes me in particular is the growth in new species documented. There is a finite number of different kinds of organisms on our planet, and an even smaller number of them have names, but we don't seem to be approaching the limit of either. I mean, we're still seeing new birds, for crying out loud!

So what's driving all this growth? The most obvious factor from these charts is some mysterious event that happened at the end of April. What could that possibly be? It's almost as if there was some global, coordinated effort to use iNat for a few days... yes, of course, it was City Nature Challenge 2018, far and away the most successful event ever organized in terms of observations recorded on iNat and people recruited! And we at iNat had almost nothing to do with it: the whole effort was organized by folks at natural history museums and associated organizations around the world, but the founders and chief coordinators are our friends and colleagues here at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of LA: Rebecca, Alison, and Lila. Hats off to you folks. You helped make 2018 an amazing year for iNaturalist.

On top of that, we've seen a ton of growth in the southern hemisphere from countries like South Africa and Australia, but also in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK, Italy, Portugal, and Brazil. For this I think we owe a lot of thanks to enthusiastic iNaturalist Network partners and other volunteer iNat promoters in these areas, so many thanks to all of you. You can check out the Year in Review for the iNaturalist Network partners in Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Colombia, and Portugal. Also, while I'm probably biased by the fact that I manage a lot of the translation integration for the website and the Android app, I suspect at least some of this growth outside of the US is due to the translation efforts of volunteers at Crowdin (mobile) and Translatewiki (web). Translatewiki doesn't seem to provide these stats, but here are some of the top translators on crowdin for this year (ignore staffers like Alex and me, since we were mostly fixing formatting issues):

Aside from growth, I'm grateful that iNat remains a fun and useful place to share information. How fun and how useful can be difficult to quantify, but the publications section we added to the site-wide stats helps demonstrate at least one aspect of that utility: a lot of scientific studies used iNat data this year! We have our friends at GBIF to thank for enabling this kind of citation. Unfortunately it's not yet possible to say what individual observations were used in research, which would enable us to tell you what research you helped support, but export-level citations are still very interesting. Scientists, don't forget to cite your GBIF exports!

Many thanks are, of course, due to the institutions that support us: the California Academy of Sciences for employing us on staff, the National Geographic Society for financial and promotional support, the Moore Foundation for financial support, Microsoft for donating servers and other infrastructure, and many other companies for providing free services to our cause, including Google, Slack, New Relic, and others. Running a global platform like iNaturalist is not free, even if we don't charge people to use it, so we are very grateful for the largesse of these companies and institutions. If you would also like to chip in to financially support iNaturalist, that’s possible now too.

As always, huge thanks from all of us on the iNat team to all of our fellow members in the iNat community. iNaturalist would not be possible without all of your contributions. I hope 2018 brought you many strange and wonderful creatures, and that in 2019 you'll see even more alongside your fellow naturalists.

-Ken-ichi and the iNat staff

iNaturalist reached 15,000,000 verifiable observations this week! It's getting harder and harder to come up with visualizations for this much data, so how about this tried and true trick (with apologies to the LonelyPlanet stats pages):

iNaturalist observations now represent over 190,000 distinct species! Plants, Insects, and Birds remain the big 3 species groups. I guess people love birds is old news, but cheers to 300,000 mollusk observations!

While we still have a significant bias towards North America, 2018 saw a lot of growth in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Only 400,000 observations from South America, but exciting developments are in the works there for 2019....

iNaturalist continues to just about double each year in terms of the number of observations. We launched the site in 2008, but didn't pass the 100,000 observation a year threshold until 2012.

You've heard of the 80/20 rule where 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the causes? As far as iNaturalist observers generating observations goes, it's more of a 90/20 rule with the top 20% of observers responsible for about 90% of observations so far.

In terms of data quality, about 77% of observations have been identified to the species level and about 60% are Research Quality.

Thanks as always for being part of the iNaturalist community and helping us reach this 15 Million milestone. We're having to continually upgrade the iNaturalist infrastructure to keep on top of this rapidly growing dataset. If you'd like to help support the staff and server time it takes to manage all these observations, please consider sending us a donation through our new donate page.

Our Observation of the Week is this Colombian weasel, seen in Colombia by @sultana! 

Juan de Roux, an architect/designer and a professor in the Pontifical Xaverian University in Colombia, tells me that his primary natural history interest is snails (“There are over 100,000 species of mollusks, so I never get bored or get to know the whole thing; there is always something new to find and blow my mind.”) but like many other Observation of the Week posts, the observation which was chosen is not of the observer’s favorite taxon. However, that doesn’t mean he has no history with weasels.

When I was still a kid (13), my parents moved to a huge house in northern Cali, where I could spend most of my free time in the yard, exploring, as kids do...One summer day in the mid 90s I saw something amazing: the silhouette of what to me seemed like a tiny squirrel crossed the yard at a speed that was just off for a squirrel. During the next days I had a couple more encounters with the strange animal, one of them was very close. At the time I was able to determine this had to be some sort of ferret or weasel, however I could not take pictures or find anything about mustelids in my area (those were dark times without the internet) I hoped that someday I would be able to corner this animal again and picture it. But the years passed empty, but I held that memory. Now that I think about it, the animal I saw must have been the common Mustela frenata.

Flash forward to 2011 and Juan is at his parent’s country house in the mountains outside of Cali which was being remodeled at the time. The door to one of the bathrooms opens out into the backyard and, when he opened it, he found an animal trapped inside.

Recalling my childhood events regarding weasels, I rushed for my camera upstairs. I then stood under the threshold and took a good 14 pics, with my Nikon D80, as the little animal moved frantically all over the bathroom, looking for a way out that allowed him to avoid me. I recall a weird scent, I knew at the time that mustelids have odor glands, so I was not surprised, it was something like urine and insects. When I was done with the shots I left the door opened, I did not get any nearer, as it is best to exercise precaution with wild mammals.

Without giving it much more thought, Juan stored the photos on his computer and, for the most part, forgot about them; his computer has actually since died and its drive was wiped - “thank God my mom had saved the pics on her disc.” He rediscovered the photos a few weeks ago and, now an iNat user, said

[I] felt glad I could finally do something useful with them; I uploaded them into iNaturalist, as M. frenata at first, because - I confess - I know almost nothing about weasels. Something did not feel right with the ID, though. After a day, I decided to take a second look and found this very interesting paper...At first I was a bit skeptical, reading that this is a rare species. But could see in the holotype´s pelt a black oval spot in the ventral part that simply made this species unmistakable, so I corrected my id in iNat, and then the observation started getting starred.

To give you an idea of how rare Colombian weasels are, as of 2014, when that paper was published, there were no known photographs of a living one, so Juan’s nearly lost and forgotten photos are possibly among the first ever photo documents of a living individual of this species! “I still cannot believe I was lucky to see this animal and take these pics,” he says. “Needless to say, I never saw one of these again. But at least I can gladly assure that this area has remained basically unaltered for the past decade, so it has to be out there. Perhaps this animal is not so rare, but the lack of knowledge about it, combined with its secretive nature contribute to its rarity.”

Understandably, not much is known about the Colombian weasel, but it is believed to inhabit riparian areas and feed on fish and aquatic invertebrates and even has webbed feet! It is considered to be possibly the rarest South American carnivore, and is one of the smallest members of the order Carnivora, measuring 22 cm (8.7 in) in length, sans tail. And yes, weasels do produce a strong, musky odor from their anal scent glands when scared.

Juan (pictured above) was looking for local snail data when he first learned about iNatuarlist from a friend of his. “I looked it up in hopes of finding my beloved gastropods and found myself mesmerized,” he recalls. “Not by the mollusk observations in my country (modest at best), but by the concept that anyone with a camera (even with virtually no knowledge) could contribute to build precise distribution maps for all sorts of creatures.

For the last 2 decades I had been accumulating pictures of my own observations. I had an entire folder. “Perhaps someday I can make a field guide with all this stuff,” I used to think. This was really a side project, as the amount of field work required would have been impossible to do in a single lifetime, also because the trends in nature are dynamic, and the natural environment is changing very fast (alas unfortunately for the worse) so it is definitely not a one-man task.

Thanks to iNat I have access to a collaborative network of observers, which allows my observations to be part of something big, and have a real impact. The best part is that anyone can use this potent tool without needing to have a degree in biology, which allows everybody, no matter their background, to contribute to future research.

I always travel with my cellphone, provided with a camera and my iNat app. You never know what you might be lucky enough find.

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly altered for clarity. Thank you to @jwidness for alerting me to this observation!

- Juan sent me this aerial footage of the forests near where the weasel was found.

- Héctor E. Ramírez-Chaves, co-author of the Colombia weasel paper Juan found, has been in touch with Juan and will work on disseminating this find. 

-  iNaturalist has a network node in Colombia, Naturalista, which is operated by Instituto Humboldt. 

This Great Crested Grebe, seen in Russia by @zveroboy57, is our Observation of the Week!

As iNaturalist users have continued to fill in the map with their observations, one of the most conspicuous empty spaces has been Russia and Central Asia. True, Russia is an enormous country with vast wild expanses where few people live, but the overall observation levels for Russia have been pretty low until recently. We started seeing an increase in late 2017 and then a huge spike over the past month or two. This chart of observations in Russia really says it all:

Much of this increase is due to Russian wildlife photographers who have started to share their archive of fantastic photos with the iNaturalist community, and one of those photographers is Alexander, who photographed the Great Crested Grebe you see above.

Great Crested Grebes range through much of Eurasia, as well as parts of northern Africa and Australia, and are large (for a grebe), with a wingspan of 59–73 cm (23–29 in). In the summer both males and females are resplendent in their breeding plumage and like many other grebes they participate in an elaborate courtship pas-de-deux, mirroring each others’ motions and displaying their crests. They are excellent divers and hunt for fish and other underwater prey. These grebes were hunted almost to extinction in the United Kingdom, as their head feathers were highly sought after.

Alexander (above, in wildlife photography mode) says that he has been “fond of nature from childhood,” and has recently become interested in wildlife photography. Of the Great Crest Grebes, he says “[they] are not uncommon, but they are very cautious and it is not easy to photograph them.” He recently discovered iNaturalist via Facebook and now uses it “to show my photos to the whole world.”

- by Tony Iwane

- Here are the most-faved iNaturalist observations from Russia!

- By the way, Great Crested Grebe chicks are pretty adorable.

- One of the more amazing feeds on Twitter is from Russian deep sea fisherman Roman Fedortsov, who shares photos of the awesome creatures he finds.

This group of Placopsis lichens, seen in New Zealand by @linda_johnson, is our Observation of the Week!

Since she joined the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society of New Zealand, Inc. (Forest & Bird  for short) a dozen years ago, Linda Johnson says “My interest and knowledge [in nature] has grown a lot.” She’s a coordinator for the Kiwi Conservation Club, a junior section of Forest & Bird, and “preparing nature-based activities for the KCC children has been a significant contributor to my increased knowledge about nature.” She also take part in pest control initiatives and restoration work.

Linda recently spent five days and four nights hiking The Old Ghost Road (OGR), an abandoned mining road in New Zealand’s Kahurangi National Park, and recounts

Whenever I'm out hiking I'm taking notice of what is around me and regularly stopping to get a better look around without falling over. The first day of the OGR was in beautiful beech forest and there was an abundance of bird life, especially NZ robins. On the second day we got up above the tree line and I was seeing plants I don't usually have an opportunity to see. The day was sunny and a section of the track had a rocky bank with grass and other low growing vegetation on it. There were some big boulders not covered by vegetation. The colours and shapes of the lichen on the rocks were eye catching so I stopped to take a photo.

The lichens she photographed are in the genus Placopsis, which are often referred to as “bullseye lichen” due to the their appearance. A crustose lichen, they grow tightly to their substrate (in this case a rock) and their more conspicuous structures are often grouped toward the center, with the thallus extending outward. Lichens can reproduce both sexually and asexually, and it looks like sexual reproductive structures called apothecia are the dark red dots fringed by lighter tissue. I’m not sure what the striking structures in the middle are - if you know, write in the comments!

Linda (above, on the OGR), mainly uses iNat for ID help and to make sure there are records for particular places. “For instance, I uploaded photos from my visits to the Chatham Islands (800km east of New Zealand), and subsequently was told I was the first person to submit data from there,” she says. “I actually started taking more photos on the OGR with iNaturalist in mind after taking the lichen photo.”

- by Tony Iwane

- Lichens have long been thought to be a symbiosis between a fungus and algae or cyanobactera, but recently a third partner has been found.

- Do lichens age? A Harvard mycologist has been studying lichens in a cemetery in an attempt to answer that question.

We're in the process of rolling out new functionality called Taxon Frameworks. Please read about them here. But in a nutshell, taxon frameworks allow us to track and communicate what we mean by a particular branch of the tree of life and thus what we're all agreeing to reference and curate towards. Taxon Frameworks can be sourced to external secondary authorities like the Reptile Database and deviations from the authorities can be explicitly mapped. We've also folded in the existing 'complete taxa' and 'taxon curators' functionality into taxon frameworks.

Some background: the core activity on iNaturalist is observing and identifying observations by hanging them on the Tree of Life. The tree of life on iNaturalist is a single global taxonomy that we all share. A big thank you to the few dedicated iNaturalist Curators who are responsible for maintaining this taxonomy.

The policy on iNaturalist has generally been to adhere to secondary taxonomic authorities (like the Reptile Database) for a number of reasons. However, as iNaturalist has grown, its been increasingly difficult to manage information about these secondary taxonomic authorities including what they are, when we defer to them, and when we deviate from them.

Over the last year, I've been experimenting with ways to better manage iNaturalist taxonomy with a few informal taxonomy working groups and some pilot features like 'complete taxa' and 'taxon curators'. These features allow branches of the tree of life to be curated only by a smaller subset of curators assigned to a particular branch and to make it clear that these branches have all taxa added.

While this pilot has been productive, using journal posts, projects, external spreadsheets, and flags hasn't been the best way to maintain, share, and communicate all of this information. Keeping track of 'deviations' - places where we wish to depart from whatever secondary taxonomic authority we're otherwise following - has been particularly difficult with the existing system.

We're still in the process of rolling out the Taxon Framework features including migrating over content managed by the old system and updating documentation. But I wanted to give everyone a heads up about this functionality incase you stumble across it. Also for the moment, only iNat staff can create/edit taxon frameworks and taxon framework relationships while we continue testing things and getting the bugs out.

As we continue experimenting with ways of leverage the Tree of Life on iNaturalist - from making computer vision suggestions and consensus identifications more sophisticated to tracking range extensions and other discoveries - its becoming increasingly important that we have a well formed and robust tree of life to build these systems on. While we recognize that the tree of life will always be constantly changing, we're striving towards systems where it changes in a more structured way. Taxon frameworks are a step in this direction by letting us explicitly lay out what taxonomy we're all agreeing to reference by stitching together secondary sources and the judicious use of deviations.

At the moment, we have about 25 taxonomic frameworks covering much of the tree of life:

When we scale the tree by the number of observations, about 75% of observations are covered by taxon frameworks. The major 'holes' in this coverage are Lepidoptera and several other insect orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, and Hemiptera), Fungi, and Bryophytes, and various marine invertebrates such as Malacostraca, Cnidarians, Echinoderms etc.

I believe the World Registry of Marine Species can be used as a basis of frameworks for many of these marine invertebrate groups. For Bryophytes, Goffinet, B., W.R Buck and A.J. Shaw (2008), Morphology and classification of the Bryophyta looks promising.

For Fungi, it would be great if Fungi leaders in the iNaturalist community could come together and provide some guidance. In the past we used Index Fungorum but there were too many instances where the community wanted to deviate from this reference so Fungi are currently a bit of a free for all. If we could use taxon frameworks and deviations to rein Fungus taxonomy in to something that would have broad buy in by the community that would be fantastic.

This leaves Lepidoptera and the other Insect orders. The Orthoptera Species Files and a few other "Species Files" exist for smaller orders but guidance on what to do about the large orders like Lepidoptera would be very helpful. Remember, while ideally taxon frameworks would extend all the way down to species, they can rather only extend down to coarser nodes. For example, even constraining Lepidoptera taxonomy down globally to tribe would be hugely helpful in terms of reining in taxonomic free-for-all.

People often get very passionate about taxonomy - which I guess is good. But as we work towards a consensus taxonomy that we all share, I'll close with a plea for a spirit of compromise and flexibility. The iNat tree of life exists in this weird place between phylogeny (a tree that exactly matches evolutionary history) and taxonomic nomenclature (a set of rules for categorizing things). The taxonomies behind Catalogue of Life, GBIF, the IUCN Redlist, EOL and others occupy similar spaces. This means that while most of the changes come from trying to make the trees reflect evolutionary history, they still have many useful but non-'natural' (non-monophyletic) groups like 'Reptiles'. iNat curators coming from more of the phylogenetic philosophy often want to totally restructure the tree with something that better reflects evolutionary history. While this is a critical component of guiding taxonomic decisions, other factors like stability and simplicity must also be considered too. At its core, the iNaturalist tree is still a Linnaean taxonomy and unnamed ranks such as 'clade' can't be accommodated by the system at the moment. Please try to be open minded and flexible as we compromise towards a consensus taxonomy even if it doesn't result in a perfect phylogeny.

Similarly, iNaturalist isn't built to accommodate all of the rules and metadata that have governed taxonomic nomenclature back to the days of Linnaeus. Some things like quadrinomials are allowed under the rules of nomenclature but can't be accommodated by the iNaturalist system at the moment. Please be similarly flexible regarding some of the strict rules of nomenclature and the omission of certain nomenclatural metadata like types and authors. Once taxon frameworks become editable by iNat curators, we hope they will be places for curators to add some of this metadata if they wish.

This melanistic Serval, seen in Kenya by @srullman, is our Observation of the Week!

“I’d like to be a biologist because I like to study life. I like to cut off bark of trees with my pocketknife. I like to study plants and things. I like [to] study animals, especially raccoons, foxes, and all living things.”

That’s what Dr. Stan Rullman wrote while in second grade, when responding to the question What do you want to be when you grow up? While he denies debarking trees with his knife (and now wonders why a second grader was allowed to run around with a pocket knife), Stan does “recall prying off the bark of fallen trees to look for critters and see the intricate patterns of bark beetles underneath.”

Stan’s second grade essay proved prescient, as he earned a PhD in Urban Ecology and worked as a Wildlife/Conservation Biologist and Educator on Washington State’s Bainbridge Island before his current position as Research Director for Earthwatch Institute. “I help oversee our support of research projects in about 30 countries around the world, most of which have something to do with wildlife and conservation,” he explains. “I am very interested in human-wildlife conflict issues, which seem to be increasing as wild creatures find the space allotted them to be more and more restricted, and primary food resources shrinking, prompting their forays into the human realm.”

It was on a trip with students from the North Hollywood High School Zoo Magnet that Stan encountered the melanistic serval you see pictured here. Thanks to funding from Linda Duttenhaver, several students and zoo staff get to participate in an Earthwatch project each year, and in 2017 they traveled to Kenya and took part in a project “assessing the efficacy of various deterrents deployed to keep elephants out of the crops that local community members struggle to grow in the increasingly dry, arid conditions.”

While in the field, the group noticed hornbills and White-bellied Go-Away-Birds mobbing an animal. At first they figured it was a black dog, but it soon became clear that the animal was a felid, “though the black color was throwing all of us off.”

I was in the front of the bush vehicle with Dr. Bruce Schulte, the principal investigator for the elephant project, with a crew of the students standing up and observing the creature’s progress through the pop-top, open-air roof. We kept as quiet as we possibly could, with the only noise being the digital clicking from the cameras...Finally, when it was about 40 meters away, it stopped— suddenly aware of something blocking its progress down the road. Equally nervous and curious, it slunk off the road, skirting around our vehicle about 30-35 meters away through the grass and brush.    

If you’re familiar with servals, you’ll know why the group was at first taken aback by the black fur of this melanistic individual - the coats of most servals have a yellowish ground color spangled with black dots and stripes. A medium sized cat (they weigh 8-18 kg (18-40 lbs) and reach a height of about 54-62 cm (21-24 in) at the shoulder), the serval is a solitary predator that generally eats small prey such as rodents, birds, insects, and snakes. They’re known for their incredible leaping ability, which they can use to knock down larger birds.

Stan waited over a year to post this observation because he was concerned about bringing attention to such an uncommon individual cat, but after seeing an article about melanistic leopards he got in touch with the article’s author, Dr. Lucas Gonçalves, a Brazilian wildlife biologist. “I sent him some photos of the Tsavo serval, and he indicated 16 records of such creatures, primarily from the Mt. Kenya area (where they are fairly well known) as well as the Pare Mountains of northern Tanzania - just across the border from the Tsavo complex. That really sparked my interest in this topic, and eventually, wore down my concerns regarding ‘outing’ this fabulous cat.”

Stan (pictured above) has “been promoting iNaturalist as a bridge between observers and the highly participatory (and certainly not passive) nature of collecting and posting of their observations - making them available to the larger scientific community,” and is currently suggesting iNaturalist could be used “to engage our local residents in collecting observations of obligate vernal pool species (e.g. fairy shrimp, wood frogs/blue-spotted salamanders/spotted salamanders (eggs), etc.) that could then be provided to the Massachusetts Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program” to help protect the vernal pools in and around his township. He sees data created by citizen scientists as a powerful way to engage with policymakers.

And Stan tells me that using iNaturalist “has rekindled my interest in what E.O. Wilson calls ‘the little things that run the world,’...

Though much of my professional career as a naturalist first and ecologist later has shifted my focus to birds and carnivores, I still find myself looking under logs and bark, especially if I’ve got my macro lens with me to document such observations on iNaturalist.

- by Tony Iwane.

- After an inspiring National Moth Week event, Stan has now started Project Porchlight on iNaturalist, check it out!

- Stan sent me to this interesting paper about citizen science and conservation decision-making.

- “The students from the zoo were absolutely amazing to work with,” says Stan. “Their passion for nature, their untarnished sense of wonder, and their interest in the research were inspiring. And several of the students were avid iNaturalists!” Here are @rynaturalist‘s posts from the trip.

This group of Boleophthalmus dussumieri mudskippers, seen in India by @anil_kumar_verma, is our Observation of the Week!

“I believe we are all born in love with nature,” says Anil Kumar Verma. “Who among us doesn’t like to be in peaceful environment of forests, mountains & lakes. While I was a kid, used to live near ‘Western Yamuna’ canal in Yamuna Nagar, Haryana, India. This canal was dotted with trees on banks and we would go chasing butterflies & birds. Somewhere in search of a good life, this got left behind. This interest got re-kindled in 2012, when I got my DSLR. This gave me the power to capture in a good way whatever I observed.”

Anil now often goes out to photograph wildlife in the Yeeor Range as well as the Nagla Range in Sanjay Gandhi National Park and makes other excursions with groups of fellow nature photographers. He has also made several visits to the bank of the Vasai Creek near Kolshet village at dawn to capture the sunset (see below), and this is where he’s seen mudskippers mucking about. However, Anil has often lacked the proper lens with which to photograph them.

This time [however], I had a visit along with photo enthusiast buddies and had the luxury of a 100-400mm lens. And after so many years, I finally captured my observation of mudskippers...This was the last observation to be made and captured. Loved the way these creatures were present in hundreds and moving around in mud. The shining blue eyes catch one’s attention and it took quite some time getting it right.

Anil posted his mudskipper photos to iNaturalist and Gianluca Polgar (@gianlucapolgar), a mudskipper specialist from Italy, idenitfied as Boleophthalmus dussumieri. I asked Gianluca about this species, and he tells me it’s one of three fascinating species that live along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, feeding on “microscopic and filamentous algae on the surface of the mud during low tide, scraping the mud surface using their comb-like lower-jaw teeth and characteristic side-to-side head movements.”

They make burrows in the mud (as do other mudskippers) which can be over a meter deep; useful for hiding during high tide. But at low tide the fish come out and, according to Gianluca, “dig a shallow pool around one of the openings that does not dry out during low tide, and where the concentration of microscopic algae happens to be higher... therefore, they appear to cultivate small muddy gardens!” The mudskippers also engage in territorial disputes, especially in areas of high density, such as Kuwait Bay, and Gianluca tells me

apparently due to these high densities, the mud dug by each individual and accumulated around the defended area builds up with the mud dug by the neighbours and is ‘cooked’ under the strong sun, thus creating a peculiar pentagonal pattern on the mudflat which resists to flood tide currents and is visible at a large distance.

Anil (above) first learned about iNaturalist in a Facebook post by Roger Kendrick (@hkmoths) and says “now, I’m trying to put most of my observations here. This is helping me put all of them in one place. Before this, I had so many pictures without species or family name. The iNaturalist community has helped me document most of it...iNaturalist’s efforts in building a community of observers and identifiers has brought a renewed focus in my observations.

I would say, I started my journey as a photographer, somewhere, somehow getting to know what I’ve captured. iNaturalist is giving me a direction towards being a naturalist, making me understand the natural world, its diversity.

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

- Amazing footage of mudskippers fighting, burrowing, and more.

- Check out Gianluca’s mudskipper website.

- Here are the most-faved mudskipper observations on iNat.