“I grew up in Lithuania with biologist parents and I’ve been an avid chaser of all things moving as far as I can remember,” recalls Andrius. A biologist now himself, Andrius is a research fellow at the University of Vienna (Austria), studying the behavior of Neotropical frogs. “My biggest passion remains chasing animals in the field and I’m extremely lucky that my research allow me to do just that. I spend prolonged periods of time in the field in South and Central America where I mostly study the spatial behavior of the so-called poison frogs. Actually, I just arrived in French Guiana for another 2 months of frog tracking!”
Andrius found the above snail and snake in his favorite research station in the Nouragues Nature Reserve, located in the tropical rainforest in French Guiana. Andrius recalls “we happened to find this beautiful small snake (first time for me) right on our kitchen table!” He thought the snail looked like a beret, which was fitting for a French research station, and furthermore
The scene was even more absurd and intriguing because [Cloudy Snail-eating snake] is primarily a snail-eating snake! We kept discussing whether it was a smart trick from the snake to keep the dinner for later or whether that was a daring escape strategy of a sneaky snail. We released the two “companions” on a bush next to the kitchen where I snapped these pictures.
More commonly found in trees than on kitchen tables, Cloudy Snail-eating snakes range from Mexico into South America and even onto some islands in the Caribbean, like Trinidad and Tobago. They’re nocturnal (check out those huge eyes!) and do like to hunt snails and slugs, as well as worms and other prey.
Andrius (above, with a mantid on his face) says
iNaturalist rebooted my interest in keeping records of my observations and paying attention not only to my research subjects but to all living things around me. I realised that over time I started ignoring plants, fungi, and animals that I didn’t know much about and had no easy way to identify. I was also never good at keeping well organised notes and photo catalogues of my various travels and observations. Now I’m happy once again to snap photos other very ordinary as well as extraordinary plants, fungi, and animals! iNaturalist takes care of the rest.
- by Tony Iwane
- You can follow Andrius on Twitter and check out his photos Facebook.
- Members of Pareas, genus of gastropod-eating snakes from Asia, have more teeth on their right jaw than left jaw, allowing them to eat “right-handed” snails more easily. In areas where they occur, “left-handed” snails are found to occur more frequently. How cool is that?
Simon Grove is all about sharing. As the Senior Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), Simon’s main duty is to care for the museum’s collections, but he says “I'm also interested in outreach, which is one reason I take photos of living insects and spiders.” Not only does he post them on Flickr (and is currently importing his Flickr photos to iNat), he shares them on two FacebookGroups and his own Facebook page as well as on the TMAG’s A Field Guide to the Fauna of Tasmania mobile app. “It's also one reason I signed up to iNaturalist, in that I can help identify or validate others' Tasmanian nature observations,” he explains.
Oh, and
My 'research-grade' observations on iNaturalist, and the accompanying photos, will also find their way onto our national recording platform, the Atlas of Living Australia, where the photos will help others identify their own observations while the observations will augment museums' specimen-based records in helping us better understand what lives where around Australia.
The Celaenia excavata spider you see above is one of Simon’s older photos that he recently imported from Flickr. He found in April of 2015, sitting on a ripening almond at a community garden in Taroona. “It's a common species in suburban Hobart and elsewhere in Tasmania and southeast Australia,” says Simon, “but seldom spotted because of its close resemblance to a dollop of bird poo.” During the day, this spider rests and hides, utilizing its camouflage as protection, but at night it preys on moths, especially those commonly found in orchards.
But how does this tree-climbing but non-web-spinning spider capture its prey? Well, Simon says “[they] waft chemicals into the air which mimic the pheromones of female moths. When a male moth comes to investigate the source of the smell, the spider has a chance of grabbing it.” You can see another iNaturalist observation showing a Celaenia excavata eating a moth here. The myriad ways in which spiders have evolved to capture prey is astounding.
Here’s to more amazing observations from Simon’s archive!
- by Tony Iwane
- Bolas spiders also look like bird droppings (or snails) and use pheremones to draw in moths. However they use a “bolas” made of silk and glue to catch their prey. Check it out!
“I started undergrad wanting to be a human doctor, but now I’m sort of a prairie doctor,” says field botanist cassi saari. “I work in the field of ecological restoration where I design and monitor habitat restoration projects and help people inventory and manage their natural lands, from ponds to woods, streams, dunes, marshes, prairies, or savannas.”
Lucky for iNat, when cassi isn’t tending to the prairie’s needs, she’s taking care of things on iNaturalist as one of our most active Curators. She’s enjoyed “stepping up my...curator activities on iNaturalist: maintaining the taxonomic database, helping new users, resolving issues, and improving the quality of the data.” Keeping up with taxonomy and our community is a huge job, and our noble Curators, like cassi, are people who spend some of their free time helping out in the many ways cassi mentioned. They’re a vital part of iNat.
Now back to that frosty flower. cassi spotted it on
a foggy but very cold morning drive to the office [above]. The drive is quite dull - all city, then suburbs, then long, flat stretches of harvested fields of corn and soy…[it’s] always a stark reminder that 99.9% of the prairie lands in Illinois have been destroyed by farming, grazing, and development.
But the land around cassi’s office (pictured above) is “a little oasis of wetland and prairie with hundreds of species of native plants...part remnant, part restored.” When she pulled up in her car, she says “I saw the hoarfrost clinging to plant stems and couldn’t help but stop and make some observations.” One of which, of course, was the Gray-headed Coneflower you see at the top of the page. “Working year-round as a field botanist is a fun challenge in winter botanizing. One of my favorite things about iNaturalist is adding to the growing database of plant photos when they’re not flowering (which is usually when I need to be able to identify them),” she explains.
When describing Gray-headed Coneflowers, cassi first mentions their distinctive shape, calling them “one of several prairie sentinels that forms a charismatic silhouette at dawn and dusk at any time of the year.” Like other member sof the Asteraceae or “sunflower” family of plants, their “flowers” are actually inflorescences made up of many tiny florets, with about 15 of them on the outside growing the large petals we recognize. “The flowers and fruits are easily recognized and its frequent use in prairie restorations makes it one of the first native wildflowers that people learn around here,” says cassi.
An iNat user since 2012, cassi has mainly focused on plants, but says “this year I’m aiming to be a 100% naturalist by observing more animals, fungi, and other creatures, since sometimes I seem to have the opposite of plant blindness…”
- by Tony Iwane
- You can check out cassi’s personal website here.
- In 2017 the Illinois Native Plant Society held its second annual Illinois Botanists Big Year and cassi came in at number one, contributing over 900 species.
“As always I was looking for birds,” says Ausra Zilinskiene, recalling the day back in the spring of 2016 when she photographed the above frog. About seven or eight years ago was when she started observing animals, mainly birds. “I started to watch live web cameras of the storks nests. This was beginning of my way...I bought a camera and at the beginning sat for hours under the storks nests in the village, and later found that other birds are even more interesting than storks.”
Back to May of 2016. “In that day I had a hope to meet the Eurasian bittern,” recalls Ausra. “I could hear its voice in the reeds, but unfortunately the bittern did not give me a chance to see it.” She did, however, hear the mating calls of frogs around her. “It was May, mating time and water frogs all were "In love." :) There were a lots of frogs in the swamp. I lay down in the dirt near the swamp and started to observe them, trying to catch good moments for taking photos. The frog from photo was the largest of all frogs and its voice was the loudest.”
So why can’t we get this frog down to species? Ausra, on the advice of a more experienced herper, identified it as Pelophylax esculentus, commonly known as the “Edible Frog” (and yes, that is the frog whose legs are eaten as a delicacy). But as experienced Lithuanian natuarlist @almantas notes, “I received a note that their species are actually separated by genetic analysis, all other signs are not diagnostic.” So while we can get it down to genus from a photo, it would take genetic analysis to determine the species. AmphibiaWeb states that “genetic, ecological and behavioral studies in these frogs are in progress.”
One cool thing about P. eculentus, though, is that it is a hybrid of two species, Pelophylax lessonae and Pelophylax ridibundus, and itself reproduces hemiclonally, in a complicated process called hybridogenesis. Basically the process results in “each generation is half (or hemi-) clonal on the mother's side and has half new genetic material from the father's side.” (Wikipedia)
Right now Ausra is holed up during the winter, but says “I hope in Spring I'll continue my observations…
My purpose in iNaturalist is to show all species that I find and can identify in this small area of our planet, where I am observing nature. I think it would be nice to have the opportunity to open up the map of iNaturalist and to see what can we find in every part of Earth. But for this many naturalists must do a great job. I do hope that every day, new people will enter their observations and there will be less white areas in the map.
- by Tony Iwane. (Some of Ausra’s quotes have been lightly edited, as English is not her first language)
- Ausra humbly claims that “my photos aren't very good, because I am not a good photographer, but the camera helps me to focus and to find new interesting things. The camera helps me to see.” But I beg to differ, check out her observations here!
- You want to know what Edible Frog calls sound like, right? Of course you do - and you won’t be disappointed.
Turns out the way we handled explicit disagreements wasn't quite meeting one of the goals we had, which was to allow people to add more conservative identifications without changing the taxon the observation was associated with, so after running things by the Google Group we made a somewhat more radical change. The Community Taxon will continue to operate as it did, but the taxon an observation is associated with should now be the most specific proposed taxon with which no one disagrees. Here are some examples:
ID 1: Homo sapiens ID 2: Genus Homo, not a disagreement
=> CID: Genus Homo (this is what the community of 2 agree on)
=> Observation Taxon: Homo sapiens (the finest proposed taxon no one disagrees with)
So now this observation will show up as Homo sapiens in search results and such. It's still in "Needs ID" b/c there's no consensus at the species level, but the user who made ID 2 can chime in without bumping the observation back to species-level.
Here's the slightly more controversial scenario:
ID 1: Genus Homo ID 2: Genus Homo ID 3: Homo sapiens => CID: Genus Homo (this is what the community of 3 agree on)
=> Observation Taxon: Homo sapiens (the finest proposed taxon no one disagrees with)
This is a bit less conservative than we've been in the past because observations can move toward a finer taxon with less community consensus. Some people (cough*Scott*cough) like this because hey, no one's said it isn't Homo sapiens so why not go with that until there's a contradiction? Others (cough*me*cough) are probably going to feel like this just makes it easier for incautious identifiers to shift more observations toward incorrect taxa. To my fellow naysayers, this might also mean that fewer people click "Agree?" just to move the observation to species level, so maybe we'll end up with more incorrectly-identified observations in "Needs ID" but fewer in "Research Grade," which might be a good thing.
We've made a slight change to how we handle conservative identification disagreements. Previously, if an observation was of a dog and you identified it as a mammal, iNat would assume that your ID was a disagreement, i.e. that you both thought the observation was a mammal and was not a dog. Personally, I've always thought this was a simple way to force disagreements to be constructive, but it's also caused a lot of confusion of the years. Now, if you add an ID of a taxon that contains the observation's community taxon, iNat will force you to choose whether you mean to disagree or not. It makes the identification process slightly more cumbersome, but hopefully less confusing, especially for new users.
Bonus: this also lets you add constructive identifications in situations where they would have previously been considered disagreements, e.g.
ID 1: Mammal (CID is Mammalia)
ID 2: Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica (CID is Mammalia)
ID 3: Vulpes vulpes (CID is Vulpes vulpes)
ID 4: Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica (CID is Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica)
Before, that species-level ID would count as a disagreement with the subspecies ID before it, but now it can just be a "best guess" and the additional subspecies ID can shift the CID to subspecies.
Anyway, this is mostly just going to affect the hardcore identifiers out there. Hopefully it won't be too much of a problem for you folks. The apps do not yet support this behavior so IDs from there will continue to work like IDs before, i.e. IDs of taxa that contain the community taxon will count as implicit disagreements.
For someone who’s only seventeen years of age, oscarkokako is already an accomplished naturalist. His interest in birds was sparked by a field trip to the Tiritiri Matangi Open Sanctuary when he was just eight years old. “I had a school teacher who was one of the founders…[and] I quickly got hooked on New Zealand’s diverse and unique array of native birds, my favourite being the Kokako (even though it took a few trips to see one),” says Oscar.
He’s already seen over 160 of New Zealand’s birds species, and was recently part of a research trip to the Chatham Islands, “to help survey their critically endangered birds, including the Shore plover, Chatham Island snipe and the Black robin.” The latter species was one of the rarest birds in the world, with a lone breeding pair in existence (and five individuals overall) by 1980. In addition to birds, Oscar says he’s now “trying to branch out into reptiles, insects and other [taxa] to gain a better idea of the entire picture.”
Mammals, of course, would be one of those non-avian taxa, as Oscar’s fantastic photo proves. He was volunteering for Napier’s Department of Conservation and he and friend went to the estuary to look for some birds that had recently been sighted there, when
Not 100 metres down the track from where I observed them, I came across the weasel. It was maybe 20cm long and running directly at me, holding its young (which at the time I thought was a baby rabbit). I heard these creatures were fairly blind so I decided to just lie down on the path and wait for it to come closer for a photo. Better to document this event than to try and catch it, as they are rarely photographed in New Zealand.
About that last point, Oscar is definitely correct - of the 15 Middle-European weasels (in New Zealand) posted on iNat, Oscar’s is the only one that depicts a living animal (the rest are all dead ones found in traps). Weasels were introduced to New Zealand in the late 1800s, as a response to the growing rabbit overpopulation problem on the islands, and they now pose a threat to many of the island’s native organisms.
“For some context, New Zealand had no mammalian predators before humans arrived here, bringing rodents, mustelids, cats and dogs,” says Oscar.
As a result, none of our native wildlife had adapted to protect itself against threats such as these. Many of the birds even became near flightless, as they had to hide from aerial predators through camouflage. Mammals, however, hunt using smell as opposed to sight, rendering many of our species defences futile. Kakapo are said to have a musty-sweet odour, which may be why only 130 individuals remain today.
Oscar, pictured above with a Kokako perched on his head, is currently a volunteer guide at Tiritiri Matangi and working with the Auckland Zoo on their conservation efforts. He uses iNaturalist to “keep a catalogue of all the organisms I see around the country. Obviously, this is difficult to achieve with insects and plants, as they are so plentiful and harder to identify correctly. I even have trouble walking past plants now without stopping to check if I’ve uploaded it yet.
NaturewatchNZ [iNat’s partner site in New Zealand] is full of smart and helpful users ready to identify even the most indecipherable photographs of things. A few years ago I had no idea about the website, but now I find more and more of my friends joining up, or else coming to me with the organisms they cannot identify. Our community consists of over 5,000 members with 272,000 observations of 11,300 species, and is steadily increasing.
- by Tony Iwane
- Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an interesting article about New Zealand and its invasive mammal problem for The New Yorker.
Most of it is self-explanatory, but there are some tricky bits:
We're mostly just showing counts of verifiable observations. That means even though we're showing some "casual" observations in the pie chart at the top, the number in the middle is for your verifiable observations.
"Species" means "leaf taxa." If you have one observation of Genus Hyla and another of the species Vulpes vulpes we count that as two "species." If you have one of Genus Vulpes and another of the species Vulpes vulpes, we count that as one "species."
"Most Comments and Faves" are sorted by faves, then comments. Observations with lots of comments tend to be interesting, but observations with lots of faves tend to be pretty. We're suckers for pretty.
The map is interactive! Zoom around and you can watch the animation on a local scale. You can also click the date to pause and use the arrow keys to move forward and backward in time.
The "sunburst" is also interactive! This diagram will probably be a bit mystifying for some folks, but mousing over things will explain what the arcs represent, and you can click on them to view just that taxon. For touch users, tapping will have to suffice.
We may add a few more charts if we're not too busy celebrating the new year (or surviving our holiday colds). Hope you're all having a splendid holiday season, and, as always, many thanks for all you've done to make iNat what it is today! Here's to another great year.
As a community, we've observed 1/3 of all known vertebrate species on iNaturalist! Plus, we're ticking an additional 5 to 10 new species each day. How do we know this? We're introducing new functionality that allows us to mark a taxonomic clade on iNaturalist as "complete" and then keep track of how many species on that list are ticked off with observations over time. Below I'll explain how we're using "complete taxa" tools to tally vertebrate species.
Marking a clade as complete means that all extant species in the clade are included in the iNaturalist taxonomy - no more and no fewer. Since vertebrates are marked as complete, you'll now notice new decorations under the taxonomy tab indicating this on taxon pages that fall within it. There is also a section listing "Taxon Curators" who are now the only curators with permissions to edit members of a complete clade.
Because complete taxa give us a clearer understanding of all the potential species in a clade, they allow us to track some interesting stats about progress the iNaturalist community has made in ticking these off of the list. At the top of a taxon page that falls within a complete taxon, you'll see a new "Total Species Observed" stat which, at the time of this writing, is "22,538 of 68,295" for vertebrates. The denominator is defined by the "complete" iNaturalist taxonomy and the numerator counts the subset of these species that have been observed. It's kind of remarkable that we've collectively observed 1/3 of all vertebrate species. Considering the thousands of rare deep-sea fishes, tropical herps with tiny ranges, and nocturnal bats and rodents that this number includes, this is a pretty amazing accomplishment!.
Under the trends tab, below the "Trending" feed there are two new feeds. The first is "Discoveries." This shows the most recent newly-identified species in the taxon. The second is "Wanted" which shows species in the taxon that have not yet been observed.
I did a quick analysis of the vertebrate discoveries from the last 38 days and I count:
3 other fishes Here's how those discoveries over the last 38 days stack up over time. It's pretty exciting to see that we're getting about 5-10 new vertebrates added to iNaturalist each day. At that rate it will take us about 4 more years to reach half of all vertebrates. It will be interesting to see if that rate gets damped by increasingly hard-to-get species or boosted by a growing iNaturalist community.
You can click through to see the actual observations responsible for the growth in Discoveries. Mapping them reveals that most of these discoveries are coming from the tropics of the world. For example,
here's a map of the bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian discoveries from the last 38 days. This should come as no surprise since the tropics harbor the richest biodiversity on the planet and also represent some of the least-explored areas by the iNaturalist global community.
Two caveats: first, the discovery feed pulls from verifiable observations. Some are the result of mis-IDs. But they disappear from the feed as they get corrected. Second, some of the entries in the discoveries feed are triggered by taxonomic changes. For example, if the scientific name of a species changes, then the first identification of the output species will trigger an entry in the feed even though there were already identifications of the input taxon. We're working on a solution to keep these out of the feed, but in the meantime I tried to manually exclude these cases from the numbers above, but there are less than 5 complex cases that remain (e.g. when a species was in the system as two active synonyms representing the same taxa and then swapped together).
Taxonomic Details
Taxonomy is still very much a work in progress. It may come as surprise to some that we don't yet have a global list for plants or even butterflies. This means that the taxonomy for many branches of the tree of life for iNaturalist will inevitably be messy. Some taxa will be missing, while others will be duplicated as "synonyms" (different names that all refer to the same taxon). Fortunately, the branch of life representing we humans and our closest relatives, the vertebrates, is relatively well-known. For each of the 10 classes making up this subphylum, there are relatively well-maintained and continually updating checklists that list all extant species members globally. iNaturalist has adopted several of these lists as external taxonomic references. They are: FishBase for the 6 fish Classes, Amphibian Species of the World for amphibians, the Reptiles Database for reptiles, the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World for birds, and the IUCN RedList itself for mammals.
While new species of vertebrates are being described each day, these external taxonomic references at least strive to be relatively complete and to keep relatively up to date. Keeping iNaturalist in sync with these lists should, in theory, reduce curation work and taxonomic confusion for everybody
However, it's difficult to get the entire iNaturalist community onboard with a single external taxonomic reference. The inevitable errors, lag-time in adopting new species, and subjective taxonomic opinions in any list will frustrate some members of the iNaturalist community. When this happens, we can make an exception against using the external taxonomic reference for the controversial taxon/taxa in question by making an explicit discrepancy. For example, the Reptile Database considers just one species of Mountain Kingsnake in California, Lampropeltis zonata sensu lato (meaning in the broad sense). However, the most widely used regional reptile reference in California considers these snakes to represent 2 species, Lampropeltis multifasciata and Lampropeltis zonata sensu stricto (meaning in the narrow sense). It might therefore make sense for iNaturalist to make an explicit discrepancy to avoid following the Reptile Database's decision to merge Lampropeltis multifasciata & Lampropeltis zonata sensu stricto into Lampropeltis zonata sensu lato.
I've created journal posts to serve as discussions for proposing and making decisions about explicit discrepancies for
reptiles, fishes, mammals, and amphibians. Please contribute to those conversations if you'd like to discuss explicit discrepancies for each of these clades.
A naturalist from Iraq, zain1224 got into nature, as many of us did, through insects, which he found “intriguing” as as child. He read articles about birds and other organisms, and says “when I got a camera I began to photograph insects and every living that I laid eyes on.”
Insects, are also how he spotted the Egyptian nightjar pictured above. He recalls,
I was walking around with me and my friend in the area called the Baghdad district in Muhafda Basra in southern Iraq, and I was filming insects when I saw a bird fly from the dry grass. And when I went to the place it flew I found the bird's nest and there were birds but not adults and it was wonderful. I took the camera and I took a few shots.
The name “nightjar” comes from an old belief that these birds suck the milk from goats (and apparently put it in a jar?). While the “night” part is correct - they rely on camouflage plumage to hide during the day, then awake at dusk - nightjars instead consume moths and other large nocturnal insects, thanks to their insanely wide mouths. The one zain1224 saw is a juvenile, and you can see it with another nightjar (possibly a parent) in the photo below. They don’t build nests but rather their their eggs on the ground. This species, the Egyptian nightjar, ranges from southwestern Asia to northern Africa.
“I use inaturalist because I want to share with people what I'm filming and say that we humans are not the ones who live in this small world,” says zain1224. “ Every creature must be respected no matter how small. iNaturalist has changed my view of the world, because the world is full of animals in every corner of this planet, there are lives to discover and document.”
- by Tony Iwane
(Some of zain1224′s quotes have been lightly edited.)
- After a shaky beginning, here’s some great footage of an Egyptian nightjar.
- Check out Cosmos magazine’s article about nightjar camouflage, which includes some awesome in situ photos.
- There are over 350 observations in Iraq, most of which are zain1224′s, definitely take a look at them.
