I'm an aquatic ecologist/entomologist at BIO-WEST in Texas. I have a PhD in biology and was previously a postdoc at Florida International University, where I still hold an appointment.

I mostly work with aquatic Coleoptera and Heteroptera, but also work with freshwater communities in general. Much of my current work with aquatic beetles is on the ecology and conservation of various species in families such as Hydrophilidae, Dryopidae, Elmidae, and Dytiscidae, among others. I am also working on a lot of other projects related to the aquatic Heteroptera (Gerromorpha, Nepomorpha, Leptopodomorpha).

If you would like some of your observations identified to species, I'm happy to identify some legally collected specimens. I'm more apt to accept more specimens of certain groups if they fit with my current research focus; I maintain a sizeable personal insect research collection (only a small portion of which is represented by images I post here), but a lot of the other specimens I collect or receive end up in a variety of institutional collections (or can be returned to you). If you have larger projects that require professional services, that would necessitate further discussion. I'm also open to collaboration on a variety of scientific projects, if you think I collect, might encounter, or work in habitats or regions that you might benefit from having data from. Message me if interested.

My personal website has some general information on my research and publications:
https://matthewpintar.net

My publications are also listed on Google Scholar and ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Pintar
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xLHF0y4AAAAJ

These days on iNaturalist, I'm mostly identify North American observations, along with some from South America. There's just too much to keep up with everything globally, but I can help with some things in particular if you request it. There are some other users that generally do a good job at getting general or specific ids for many things. However, there are a couple users that appear in the lists of "top identifiers" that really don't know any of these taxa and should not be trusted; they are also the two users who have added the most agreeing ids to my own observations. It is iNaturalist policy that you should only add ids to the level you are capable of identifying yourself; don't automatically agree with me or anyone else.

I also encourage you to only post observations you are directly responsible for making. While iNat does not have a policy against this, a lot of people post specimens that others have collected, but this has become problematic as a lot of these are improperly georeferenced, otherwise have incorrect information, duplicate data already added by professional collections to GBIF, and/or improperly credit the original identifier and/or you as the observer or generator of the data.

I am also an editor on BugGuide, but I discourage cross-posting as this is a much more powerful platform and you're more likely to get a reliable identification here. Also, please understand that much of BugGuide is written by generalists or amateurs and the pages there are not reliable sources of information.

For whatever reason iNat doesn't send me emails anymore, so I might miss mentions on observations or take a while to respond to direct messages if I'm not online. All of my data here are licensed as CC-BY, but my photos are now CC-BY-NC. This change has been due to an AI slop website that has been scraping this information and has shot to the top of the search engine rankings for many taxa. However, I am otherwise happy to share images if they are of interest.