Some of you may have noticed some mysterious identifications created over the past day, or some identifications mysteriously disappearing. I've been running a script to get past observations to conform with the change we made last February that allows observations to be associated not with the community taxon but with the most advanced proposed taxon that is a descendant of the community taxon. Unfortunately, I messed up my script and it's been adding identifications on behalf of the observers that match the new observation taxon, which added up to a lot of identifications, a lot of notifications, and many observations that were Research Grade when they shouldn't have been.

I stopped the script and am currently cleaning things up. This affected observations between 8621916 and 9700842, so roughly those created between Oct 30, 2017 and Feb 1, 2018. I am deleting the identifications that were probably created by this problem, i.e. identifications created by the observer between 2018-11-09 12:00 PST and 2018-11-10 14:00 PST on observations created between Oct 30, 2017 and Feb 1, 2018. This means I may have deleted some identifications that were genuinely created during that time period, but I figured that was a smaller price to pay than a lot of erroneously Research Grade observations. My spot checking suggested there were very few genuine identifications among those deleted, but if you think you may have been affected, let me know and I can try and get you a list of affected observations created by you in the relevant time period. Again, you would have to have been intentionally adding identifications to observations you created between Oct 30, 2017 and Feb 1, 2018, between the hours of 2018-11-09 12:00 PST and 2018-11-10 14:00 PST.

I'm sorry about this, folks.

Our Observation of the Week is this Thorny Oyster, seen in Fiji by @desertnaturalist!

Always fascinated by nature - “high school science projects involving insect collections and frog dissections cemented that interest” - Joe Thompson eventually ended forging a career in medicine but says

my twin hobbies of scuba diving and birdwatching spurred me to travel extensively to over 100 countries. While I have always been interested in nature photography, it was always frustrating to not have the ability to ID and catalog sightings. But now, with the advent of web-based programs like iNaturalist for aid in identification, I've been stimulated to broaden my photographic interests to other aspects of my travel like botany.

As you might expect, Joe has travel experience in the South Pacific and says “we were fortunate to spend 9 days recently on the island of Qamea in Fiji, where we did 10 dives and enjoyed quite a variety of marine life, especially the invertebrates. The people on Qamea were absolutely the friendliest people imaginable!”

And while diving there one of the invertebrates Joe encountered was the colorful thorny oyster pictured above. The thorny oysters, of the genus Spondylus, are actually not true oysters at all, but along with scallops are members of the superfamily Pectinoidea. Their common name comes from their incredible shells, which are often adorned with spiny growths - helpful for defense. Joe’s photo shows the colorful interior mantle of this species (S. varius), and if you look closely you can see its tiny eyes just inside the edges of the shell, reflecting the camera flash and almost sparkling. This is the largest Spondylus species, reaching about 20 cm in size.

I asked Joe (above, at the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh, India this past April) for any tips he’d like to share about traveling to see wildlife, and he told me “One key to travel, I think, is to just enjoy different cultures and focus on all of the interesting differences there are between the various areas of our planet…

Secondly, and most importantly, I think that by far the best way to travel is to get into contact with local travel agencies and nature guides that live in the country you want to visit.  Some of them often guide part-time for large international companies but are available for local guiding as well.  By booking trips with local companies, not only do the profits go directly back into the local economy, but you often get to have a much meaningful cultural experience as part of your travel.

Joe has a diving trip planned for Raja Ampat, Indonesia, and “upcoming birdwatching trips include Guyana, Colombia, and Sri Lanka, but there will be a lot of focus on butterflies and dragonflies on those trips as well! I'm sure that iNaturalist will help me with my identifications.”

- by Tony Iwane

- Those are a whole lot of green areas on Joe’s travel list, so why did he choose desertnaturalist as his iNat handle? Well, when he’s not traveling, Joe resides in the deserts of southern California and enjoys observing the wildlife and flowers in the spring, but says “I'm quite happy to leave the desert during our hot summers and go scuba diving, though!”

- Spondylus were used in various ways by many native cultures throughout the Americas and the Mediterranean, according to this article.

- Check out this Thorny Oyster, which also look to have a cool purple tunicate (among other lifeforms) on its shell.

Remember how we said we were hiring a developer and a designer? Well, we finally hired Abhas Misraraj as our new visual / UX / product designer, so please welcome him to our ever-expanding community! Abhas has that rare combination of design chops and a background in wildlife biology, plus he has Bay Area roots at UC Berkeley, just like iNaturalist itself. He's also an avid gamer like Alex, a Harry Potter fan like Ken-ichi (and also Alex), and really wants to talk to you about everything like Scott. Did I mention he has the same credit card as Amanda? He's either a great fit with the team or a very, very thorough researcher, or, of course, both. Regardless, we're impressed. Abhas will initially be working on new developments with Seek, but we'll be relying on him for almost all work that has visuals, which basically means everything on iNat we all use every day. No pressure! We're all psyched to be working with him and looking forward making stuff together!

Our Observation of the Week is this Western Brown Snake, beautifully photographed by @outstar79 in Australia!

“The glorious thing about being a snake catcher and having friends that are also snake catchers [is that] we not only get to come across our more misunderstood and maligned reptiles, we also get to witness their true behavioural traits and some of the more unusual circumstances we may find them in,” says Australian Adam Brice (@outstar79), when telling the story behind the above photo.

This fella was caught up behind a homeowner's television set that was wall mounted 1.5m high. By using a low cabinet it was able to then reach up and find a safe place to retreat to (albeit unusually high safe place!). The photo itself was taken just before being released away from any potential further human-snake interaction.

Although its common name lacks the standard words we might associate with venomous snake - cobra, viper, rattlesnake, adder, etc. - the Western Brown Snake actually “belongs to a family of snakes responsible for the most snake bite related deaths in Australia,” explains Adam. “However despite this, they are an extremely shy and skittish snake that (like all snakes) just prefer to be left alone.”

Western Brown Snakes are highly variable in color and pattern, and are similar to the Eastern Brown Snake, but have a blue/purple mouth lining rather than the Eastern Brown’s pink one (we don’t encourage you to get close in order to get an ID, however). They can be found in many different dry habitats and enjoy hiding under rocks, logs, human detritus, and apparently behind televisions. Members of the Elapidae family, brown snakes are related to cobras, sea snakes, and coral snakes, and are considered to have the most potent venom of any land snakes aside from Australia’s own Inland Taipan. Unlike vipers, elapids have fixed, rather than hinged, front fangs.

Adam (above, photographing this South-western Carpet Python) was raised in rural Western Australia and says “part of growing up in the country really is you certainly get to experience more of nature as they are literally at your doorstep. Spent many hours hiking through the bushland growing up finding all sorts of critters!” He plans on furthering his education at university and hopes to find something in the wildlife/conservation field that will mesh well with his professional and family life.

Regarding his outstanding reptile and amphibian photography, Adam tells me that he likes to capture some of the animal’s environment in his photos, and that it’s important for him to get down to the same level as the creature. Also, “for many of the subjects I photograph the eyes are just so unique that they need showcasing themselves!”

“iNaturalist has been a great resource so far in seeing the contributions from other ‘iNaturalists’ [and] being able to help with identifications and see reptiles (and other animals) in habitat throughout the varying regions,” says Adam. “I personally use it now to log my observations as it's a great way of keeping track of those species I've ticked off the list (that we all have really) :)”

- by Tony Iwane

- You can see more of Adam’s photos and read his blog here!

- While Australia is home to many of the most venomous snakes on Earth, very few humans actually die from snakebites there. Here’s an article about regions of the world where snakebites are a very significant medical issue, due often to more agrarian lifestyles and reduced access to medical care.  

Note - this blog post doesn't reflect recent changes to how lists work. The 'Species' count on a user's profile is now driven by a user's dynamic lifelist which you can also access from the lists page

A common question to both help@inaturalist.org and the iNaturalist Google Group is why the species counts on Your Observations are different from species counts elsewhere on the site such as your Life List.

Unfortunately, counting species has some subtle complexities that make this trickier to explain that we'd like. On top of that, Life List functionality on iNaturalist works quite a bit differently than the Your Observation functionality which complicates things further.

We wrote a tutorial to try to explain some of these complexities about how iNaturalist counts taxa. We also provide some steps for how to sync up your Life List count with the count displayed on Your Observations. Read more

A common theme among iNaturalist users is that they might have started out with an interest in one or two taxa (e.g. birds or plants), but once they start opening their eyes to the life around them, their interests grow and diversify. I can personally attest to this as I am now stooping over  to photograph lichens and slime molds when, not long ago, anything without scales or spinnerets was of little interest to me.

This past June, iNaturalist user @tracyk2 visited the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in southern California to do some bird watching, but she also took notice of fiddler crabs scampering about on the beach. She snapped some photos and uploaded them to iNat, identifying them as Mexican Fiddler Crabs (Leptuca crenulata), a species that has been recorded in the area.

iNaturalist Co-direct Scott Loarie (@loarie) came across her observation and, drawing from Dr. Michael Rosenberg’s (@msr) comment here, believed at least some of her crabs to be Large Mexican Fiddler Crabs (Uca princeps), a species never before recorded in the United States. Scott then notified Michael about Tracy’s sighting and asked him to take a look.

“I happen to be one of the world's experts on fiddler crab systematics (a legacy of my dissertation) and have gradually become known as the go-to-guy on iNat for questions on this group,” explains Michael. After looking at Tracy’s observation, he says “I immediately realized that this was novel to California and the US. It was when I pointed this out in the thread that the excitement built and others started looking for them, leading not only to additional confirmations of the species at that particular site, but now in other sites [see photo below] in California as well.” Other scientists who study crustaceans urged Michael to write a short research note about this range extension. And so he did.

In the publication, Michael notes that while this species has been observed slowly creeping up the coast of Baja California, Tracy’s observation is approximately 240 km further north than any previous record. The cause of this expansion, according to the paper, is likely El Niño events and warming temperatures, but “it is not likely to extend much further up the coast of California without major changes to ocean temperatures and currents.”

Michael joined iNaturalist nearly eight years ago, telling me “As a biologist who occasionally falls into OCD-like efforts to track certain things, iNaturalist appealed to me as a better way of staying on top of bird lists or mammal lists, which at the time I just had in spreadsheets.” He also found it to be a good place for him to share his nature photos.

From the perspective of a researcher, Michael says that citizen science endeavors such as iNaturalist provide “ a volunteer workforce making observations (and who can even occasionally be directed to make specific types of observations) on a scale that the formal scientific endeavor simply cannot support in any manner,” with the caveat that “identifications can sometimes be sketchy and there is a limited amount of data cleaning that can be done if one wanted to truly cross-check whether the observations are accurate...To be fair, many other ‘traditional’ sources of data can be just as messy...so it's not a problem unique to citizen science…

I suspect that most scientists currently under-appreciate how much data these endeavors are creating and how useful they might be. I haven't formally tried to create a research project based on iNaturalist data (the U. princeps observation was a fortuitous accident), but it is in my mind that the data might just be waiting there to answer the right questions if we just think to pose them.

-Male Fiddler crabs use their enormous major claw for gestures, both in combat with other males and when courting females. Here is a video, shot in San Diego, of the latter behavior.

Photo credits - Top, @tracyk2; Bottom, @thumbwave.

We've just finished another round of updates for collection projects. A little over a month ago we announced some changes to collection and umbrella projects related to joining and displaying these newer projects on observation details pages. The updates being released today allow further customization of collection projects through the use of new types of filters.

Since launch, collection project managers have been able to specify multiple taxon, place, and user filters to limit which observations are shown in the project. Today we are allowing managers to specify the inverse of these filters. For example in the case of taxa, you could always create a taxon filter of Lepidoptera, and now you can "exclusion filter" for the taxon Papilionoidea. That would result in a project that shows observations of all Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) except the Papilionoidea (butterflies) - effectively a project of moths.

It was possible to achieve this same outcome without exclusion filters, but you would have needed to create 42 taxon filters - one for each subfamily of Lepidoptera except Papilionoidea. With exclusion filters you only need to create 2 taxon filters - one for including Lepidoptera and one for excluding Papilionoidea.

These exclusion filters also apply to places (e.g. observations from the United States except California, Oregon, and Washington), and to users (e.g. observations from all users except these users).

Another new filter option for collection projects is annotation terms and values. Project managers can now choose to include observations which have annotations of a particular attribute (e.g. life stage), or a particular attribute and value (e.g life stage = adult). Currently there is a limit of one annotation filter per project, but this could be expanded over time to combine multiple filters, including an exclusion filter for annotations (e.g observations with a life stage = adult annotation, without a sex annotation).

We hope these new filters make it easier and faster to customize collection projects. As always we will continue to work on more improvements based on your feedback and we'll let you know when anything noteworthy is released.

It took a bit longer than expected, but we finally managed to hire another software engineer, so please welcome Amanda Bullington to the iNat community! Amanda will be leading us into new technological territory as we re-implement Seek in React Native, a mobile development framework that enables code sharing between Android and iPhone apps, and will allow us to reuse some of the code we use on the website as well. Hopefully she'll also be working on the many other parts of our infrastructure that rely on Javascript (website, API, etc.). In addition to being an avid hiker, Amanda is a triathlete, speaks Mandarin, and seems to be an expert in optimizing credit cards for travel bonuses, so she brings a lot to the team (I, by comparison, can run a mile, mispronounce "ni hao," and put credit cards into little boxes to get groceries, but that's about it). Anyway, we're all super excited to have Amanda onboard and are looking forward to working with her!

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Our Observation of the Week is this Amphidromus hamatus snail, seen in Malaysia by @pizzamurderer!

“I am just a casual observer from Singapore and I got into loving nature as a young kid,” says E.H., who goes by pizzamurderer on iNat (“I love bugs and pizza.” is what their profile says). E.H. previously interned in a marine lab and enjoyed that work, but says “I'm actually interested in plants and insects more so than any other taxa, but taxonomy is tough and ever-changing.”

While on a family holiday at Gunung Mulu National Park, E.H. says “I was out photographing the plethora of organisms that I had never seen before. It was a cool morning and the colourful shell of the snail caught my eyes immediately. Intrigued, I snapped a few photos and that was that.”

I reached out to @jkfoon, a malacologist who specializes in Southeast Asian mollusks, to inquire further about this find, and he told me this genus is arboreal and individuals are often found high up in trees. He also notes

perhaps the most peculiar thing with Amphidromus is that many of them are chirally dimorphic i.e. there are both right-coiling (dextral) and left-coiling (sinistral) shells within a species. This sort of developmental character is highly unusual among animals and thus, have attracted the attention of scientists.

E.H. says he uses iNaturalist and other platforms “to inquire about IDs of plants and animals that I come across while on my nature walks. Taxonomy confuses me, so having the opinions of other, more experienced nature-lovers is pretty handy.” And JK Foon emphasizes the importance of making this connection between naturalists, saying

Southeast Asia is home to multiple biodiversity hotspots. Habitat loss is accelerating across the region yet many of its native biodiversity remains to be discovered by scientists. Given that tourism is booming across the region, online citizen science contributions such as this are invaluable in helping people appreciate, discover and document species and their distributions.

- by Tony Iwane.

- There are just over sixty observations of Amphidromus snails on iNaturalist, you can see them here.

- JK Foon helped to identify an observation on iNaturalist as the rediscovery of a snail on Hon Cau island in Vietnam.

This Green Anole lapping up some sugar water at a hummingbird feeder is our Observation of the Week! It was seen in Louisiana by @vanremsen.

Van Remsen remembers being interested in pretty all types of plants and animals when he was a child, and says he had “the usual collections of bugs in jars, pressed leaves, and tropical fish tanks, and I was always fascinated with identifications.  I wanted to be able to identify every living creature in my Colorado backyard.” Birds eventually became the focus of his passion and he is now a Professor of Biological Sciences and Curator of Birds at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, where his focus is in Neotropical birds.

“I am especially interested in hummingbirds, and my Louisiana yard is an overgrown jungle of hummingbird-pollinated plants,” explains Van. He watches his feeders and has noticed Green Anole lizards on them from time to time.

I have glimpsed them suspiciously licking the feeder ports previously, but this time I was determined to photograph just exactly what this one was doing because I did not know whether this species had ever been documented drinking “nectar” (in this case sugar water).  The photo shows the tongue licking the solution, but the video link [see below] makes it clear that it is deliberately drinking from the feeder.  The question is, could it smell that the solution in the hole in the plastic “flower” was sugary and thus worth sampling, or did it just sample the liquid by chance and thus learned that it was sugary.

Herpetologist @gregpauly posted links to a few other sightings of Anoles at hummingbird feeders, but as far as I can tell Van’s question of how the lizards find the “nectar” is still unknown. However, in a paper cited here, an Emerald Anole was observed biting the red knob of a stopwatch, suggesting that color might be a factor, just as it is for the birds. Many anoles are known to eat fruit and nectar, and really who can turn down delicious sugar water, especially if it involves confusing and annoying a hummingbird?

Van heard about iNaturalist from two graduate students at the LSUMNS, @cypseloides and @henicorhina, and he uses it to help identify the non-bird organisms he comes across. 

- by Tony Iwane

- In case you can’t get enough Anoles-eating-at-hummingbird-feeder action (I can’t) here are some more videos! 

- Here’s a nice article in The Advocate about Van Remsen and the LSU ornithological collection.

- And a video of Van Remsen receiving the 2013 William Brewster Memorial Award from the American Ornithologists’ Union.