Our Observation of the Week is this Bipinnula montana orchid, seen in Uruguay by @mateoalmada!

The remarkable orchid you see above is one of our most popular recent Observations of the Day, if one goes by social media engagement, and it was seen not only by Mateo Almada but his fellow students in the Universidad del Trabajo de Uruguay’s Degree in Natural Areas Management program. I’d like to thank @flo\_grattarola for getting me in touch with Professor Matías Zarucki (@mattzarrr, below), who in turn looped in Mateo.

Students in the Natural Areas Management program train to be park rangers, and Matías tells me 

we use ​iNaturalist as a tool for the registration and identification of species during our field activities. We believe that this is a good didactic tool to motivate students and, at the same time, generate valuable information for the knowledge of biodiversity. In addition to the specific records of our field trips, we created a ​project where we document the biodiversity in two of the school grounds that we visit most often.

Field trips have unfortunately been curtailed this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in recent months the students and professors were able to restart them due to Uruguay’s generally successful containment of the virus. For example, here they are at Grutas de Salamanca.

The group visited an archaeological site in the state of Maldonado, and Mateo recalls 

The field trip objective was to visit the place and assess the conservation status of the forest. On October 27, during a walk on the hills, we were attentive, appreciating the fauna and flora, and when something caught our attention, we stopped to observe it. It was then when I appreciated the ​Bipinnula montana​. I photographed it and at night I shared it in the application, I didn’t expect the impact it had. I'm happy because it puts my country on the map on something other than football.

What impressed me the most when I saw it was the shape of the tongue with the little hairs and the ribs of the leaf that surrounded it. I felt compelled to capture that beauty with my phone and become my first plant record in iNat.

Unfortunately, not much is known about this species (“The lack of information represents here one of the problems for biodiversity conservation,” says Mateo), but we do know it grows in both Brazil and Uruguay, and generally grows on dry grasslands. 

Mateo (above), tells me “I have always admired and photographed nature a lot, [and iNaturalist] allows me to save my records in an album where I collect the richness of our biodiversity...

Through the application, I have learned about the importance of collecting information about our flora and fauna to provide data that can be of great help to researchers and natural resources managers. It's great because it is an application that reaches all audiences where anyone with a simple photo can collaborate a lot with the community.

- Here’s a project showing observations made for in the program’s two commonly-visited sites.

- A nice video (en Español) about the University’s Natural Resources Careers program

- Take a gander at other observations of this good looking genus.

This Larinioides orbweaver spider, hiding out in a moth cocoon, is our Mother’s Day Observation of the Week! Seen in the United States by @wildcarrot while she was out withher mom. 

“My earliest memories in nature are of my mom taking me out in the backyard in, what seemed like, the middle of the night with flashlights (though it was probably more like 9pm),” recalls Meghan Cassidy (@wildcarrot). Meghan and her mom watched in wonder as cicadas made their way out of the ground and then out of their nymphal shells. “My mom is the biggest reason I’m in love with and eternally curious about the natural world.”

Lately, that curiosity has been mainly directed at spiders. “My free time in the last few years has been devoted to learning about these fascinating, yet vastly misunderstood, creatures,” Meghan explains.  

iNaturalist has immensely helped me with learning more about the beautiful spiders all around me, and has enhanced my passion for these little ones. I’m able to not only learn by assisting with identifications on iNat of the variety of spiders living in the US, but also by forming connections with those users on iNaturalist who are much more knowledgeable about arachnids than myself!

I was able to iNat with Meghan a few years ago in Texas, along with others in the Texas iNat crew. But while she lives in Texas, Meghan decided to stay with her family in the northeastern state of Delaware during the lockdown, where she and her mother Rose (@wild\_irish\_rose) participated in the City Nature Challenge. “Since we were both off from work,” Meghan explains, “my mom and I planned some fun outings to natural places in Delaware we’ve never had a chance to explore before.” One of those places was Killens Pond State Park, where the two spent several hours exploring. Meghan focused on finding as many spiders as possible. “I always check man-made structures for spiders and other arthropods, and I’m so glad I did!

I noticed in the corner of the sign an odd looking cocoon with a hole in the top. I had my mind set on finding spiders this weekend, so I took a quick picture to document to iNat and was getting ready to move on until something dark moving quickly by the cocoon caught my eye. I slowly moved in closer and that’s when I spotted not a moth, but this beautiful young orbweaver using the dried cocoon as a shelter! As I got closer, she closed her legs nearer to her body, trying to disappear and protect herself from view of the giant predator (me)! After our photo shoot, I let her be to do what spiders do.

The spider she photographed is a member of the genus Larinioides, part of the orbweaver family (Araneidae). They’re well known for inhabiting structures - for example, Larinioides sclopetarius is commonly known as the “bridge spider” - and Meghan tells me “They will usually hide in a silken retreat (typically of their own making) during the day, and come out to build their large orb webs in the early evenings to capture food...It seems this one was taking advantage of the real estate left behind by the moth.” While not native to the new world, Larinioides spiders are quite widespread across North America.

Meghan (above, with her mother) says that iNaturalist has “vastly changed my perception of the world around me! I talk it up to everyone I know and lots of people I meet while in parks, and I wear my new iNaturalist shirt frequently because I love getting questions about it!

Now, I am always on the lookout for new life that I’ve never documented before, or organisms that I have no knowledge of so I can learn more about them. I can’t begin to quantify the amount I’ve learned in the last 5 or 6 years solely because of iNaturalist, and also because of the valuable relationships I have been able to make with other “nature nerds” on the platform!

- by Tony Iwane.

- You can check out Meghan’s photos on Flickr and Instagram!

- A Larinioides cornutus spider dines on a crane fly in this video.

Our Observation of the Week is this see-through Triplefin Blenny, observed in India by @g\_patil!

Gaurav Patil fell in love with nature as a youngster, inspired by the books of Jim Corbett. He decided on marine biology as the focus for his post-graduate research and, after working with sea snakes, he now works with coastal marine mammals and fishes. “But,” he tells me, “there is something else as well which lured more than anything, the intertidal zone

I got introduced to the intertidal zone exploratory walk in my college curriculum, but sadly I never took it seriously, until 3 years ago when I ended up being a part of ‘Marine Life of Mumbai’ (MLOM). Through MLOM, I got a chance to explore different shores around Mumbai, doing outreach activities like shore walks, talks, workshops etc., which helped me learn and express the intertidal habitat to a larger audience in a much better way.

Gaurav has been exploring the intertidal areas of Mumbai since 2017, and while he’s observed quite a few fish communities, he has never seen a triplefin blenny there, despite it’s “being one of the most common intertidal fish.” Nope, it was on a research trip down to the coast to Maharashtra where he photographed the fish you see above. Much of his time was spent at sea studying dolphin acoustics, but whenever he had the chance, Gaurav would explore the intertidal zone at low tide.

While I was focusing on photographing nudibranchs in the tidepool when some sudden movement happened in the neighbouring tidepool. I tried looking at the movement using my torch, but there was nothing. Again something moved and this time I went closer and took a look. For a few seconds I was speechless. I looked at it for a couple of minutes, moving in the tidepool and settling on the bottom (goby like swimming behaviour). It was a fish, as clear as the water in the tidepool, moving on the mat of zoanthids (soft corals).

I haven’t observed anything like this before, thus I rushed with my camera. But as the tide was already turned I managed to click a couple of photos, after which a wave hit me, making me wet as well as submerging the tidepool in which the fish was.

Gaurav eventually uploaded it to iNat a few weeks ago and top iNat fish identifier @maractwin identified it as a member of the triplefin family of blennies! “It was not only the long awaited first ever triplefin blenny for me,” says Gaurav, “but a memorable observation as well because of the fish’s unique appearance.”

Members of the Tripterygiidae family, triplefin blennies have three dorsal fins instead of the usual long single fin of most other blenniform fish. They spend much of their time resting on rocks or corals (in this case zoanthids) and eat mostly small invertebrates. 

Gaurav (above, exploring the intertidal) tells me he was introduced by @shaunak and @ajamalabad of MLOM, and that “iNaturalist has helped us (me and the entire MLOM team) a lot, in documentation as well as in identification. 

I had a habit of documenting natural world, but apart from just filling my hard drive it actually never helped me. Today, whatever intertidal data I have, I post it on iNaturalist and tell other people to upload their observations as well. Posting this data on such a platform is not only creating a baseline of data about this diversity but also in the future it might help several science students and scientists who work on not much explored topics from coastal India.

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

- MLOM data were used to (at least temporarily) halt the construction of a coastal road in the Mumbai area. 

- We wrote a blog post about MLOM and their use of iNat back in 2018.

-  Take a look at the nearly 3,000 triplefin blenny observations on iNat, they’re a diverse and beautiful family.

Our Observation of the Week is this Tiputinia foetida plant, seen by @pbertner in Peru - hundreds of kilometers outside its previously known range!

In addition to sweet photos of a decidedly odd plant, this observation represents the power of iNaturalist’s global community, where a Canadian photographer posted the first record in Peru of a plant previously known only in Ecuador, that was identified by a botany enthusiast in Germany.

“I knew it [was Tiputinia foetida] right away,” Kai-Philipp Schablewski (@kai\_schablewski, iNat’s top identifer of plant observations in South America) told me. Kai had read the original description of this plant from 2007, and until the photo you see above, it had only been found in northeastern Ecuador. “This observation from Peru is a record of a Tiputinia plant that was found nearly 2000 km south of the [known] distribution area in Ecuador,” Kai says. “The question now is if this is a disjunct distribution or if the plant has been overlooked in some parts in between.”

Kai, who resides in Marburg, Germany and studied botany for a time in college, has “always loved plants with special survival strategies such as cacti, alpine plants, parasitic plants, mycoheterotrophic plants, ant plants, or bromeliads.” While he hasn’t visited South America, he finds its flora amazing and does what he can to help identify observations there. And as a curator, he has added distribution maps, new taxa and more in an effort to keep iNat’s taxonomy up to date.

I did this because I want iNaturalist to become a more powerful global tool for nature conservation and science...I hope I am able to make a small contribution to nature conservation with my help on iNaturalist so that more species can be saved through this difficult time of environmental destruction in that we are in.

If you think Tiputinia foetida (the only known member of its genus) looks a little strange for a plant, you’re right - it’s parasitic, which means it does not photosynthesize and thus lacks chlorophyll. Yet unlike many familiar parasitic plants (eg most species in the Orobanchaceae family), its host is not another plant, but a fungus! That’s right, it’s a myco-heterotroph and the only part of it you’ll see above ground is its flower and related structures.

As you might suspect from its name, this plant’s flower emits a “foul, rotten fish-like odor” to which many insects are attracted, “including flies, beetles, ants, and small wasps.” (Woodward, et al. 2007) It’s not known which if they are pollinators, but it does seem likely. There are even a few insects in Paul Bertner’s photos of it here on iNaturalist.

For his part, Paul (who came across the Tiputinia foetida while photographing army ants) says “I'm rather terrible at taxonomy.

However, I spend a large amount of time in the field, both day and night...Despite having difficulties with discerning closely related species, I have a good overall idea of rainforest composition such that when I come across something new or different, I can generally recognize its importance, if not actually identify it...I only learned of [this plant’s] importance after posting here to iNat.

In addition to getting ID help (“I have a large number of insect photos from the tropics which could serve as a valuable database online, however, they are only as good as peoples' ability to find and then subsequently to find useful.”), Paul says iNat has helped him network with amateur and professional biologists more broadly.

And although he has studied cell biology and genetics, Paul (above, placing a camera trap above a peccary wallow) tells me that his current interest is tropical rainforest photography, “especially [that of] insect behaviour.” It’s brought him to tropical areas of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and remarkably Paul is a Stage IV testicular cancer survivor, having had both hip and shoulder replacement surgeries. As he writes in his Smugmug bio,

I live life now, as only one who has known hopeless hospital wards, and mortal sufferings may. I see beauty in the mosquitoes’ exquisitely crafted stylets. I feel a kinship with the cockroach, a resilient survivor, and beggary, basking in nature’s majesty. To offer but a keyhole’s view onto this world is to share my life’s story, from plagues to polliwogs, imprinted onto every pixel of every picture I take.

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

- In addition to his SmugMug page, Paul is also on Flickr.

- Take a look at our blog post about a fiddler crab observation which also represented a large range extension.

Correction: this blog post originally said the plant was found "thousands" of kilometers from its known range, but it's more in the neighborhood of 1,500 kilometers, so I've changed it to "hundreds of kilometers". Thanks for double-checking, @muir!

Our Observation of the Week is this pair of dueling Southern Elephant Seals, seen in the French Southern Territories by @admss! 

A bird enthusiast, Adrien Mauss visited the Kerguelen Islands, in the far southern Indian Ocean, in 2013. “I was lucky to spend some months [there],” Adrien tells me, and he is currently iNat’s top observer for the French Southern Territories with 89 verifiable observations. 

Elephant seals spend a majority of the year at sea hunting squid, fish, and other prey (diving to depths of over 2,000 meters!), but mate and pup on land. Males generally return before females do, and “they begin to fight for the control of a ‘harem’ of females, containing sometimes more than 20 of them,” explains Adrien.

This picture shows a typical fight. They face each other and attack with their sharp teeth, mostly around the neck. The fight finishes when one of them abdicates and runs away from the group of females. During that season, due the fights most of the males are wounded, but rarely badly. They all wear a lot of scars around the neck, and some damage to the nose [note: photo may be disturbing].

Females give birth on land and nurse their pups for just over three weeks, not eating for this entire time. The pups grow from about 40 kg (88 lbs) and triple that weight before weaning. Adrien tells me “except for their fights, elephant seals have a really peaceful life on the ground, where they have no predators and spend most of the time sleeping, snoring and dreaming.” 

“As far as I'm concerned, I'm just a nature enthusiast,” says Adrien (above, watching seabirds on the Kerguelen coast). “I've not been using INat for a long time, unlike other databases. 

But I like the way it works here, helping newbies to identify flora or fauna, and everybody is a beginner for some place of the world and/or for some genus. I like the discussions around ID and the “democratic” approach of identification with all the good and the bad that can bring...I've been birding in France and Europe for 20 years and I have a good knowledge of European birds, not much about everything else so I benefit from the skills of others here!

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

- Here’s a classic clip of David Attenborough getting too close to a male Southern Elephant Seal.

- By the end of its nursing period, a female elephant seal’s milk is about 50% fat!

Our Observation of the Week is this parasitic fungus, seen in Mexico by @dianafr!

“I was always a very curious person,” says Diana Laura Fuentes de la Rosa, a biologist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. That plus her professors who “shared with me their fascination and passion about all living things in the world” led her to study biology. Her main interests now are ecology and the conservation of terrestrial vertebrates. So of course, her observation of a fungus on an invertebrate is chosen as Observation of the Week. But the strangely beautiful tableau seen above was discovered while Diana was out looking for amphibians.

“When I was doing my field work in the Lacandona Jungle for my bachelor degree thesis I was just searching leaf litter frogs (genus Craugastor),” she recalls. “When suddenly I saw a strange larva in front of me on the forest floor. I picked it up, remembered my fungi lessons, and had no doubt on taking the picture.”

What she found was the larva of a scarab beetle that had been parasitized and killed by a fungus. There looks to be some disagreement on exactly which fungus this might be (if you know, please add an ID and comment!) but in general these fungi will attack a host animal and eventually sprout fruiting bodies (what we see here) out of the host, to spread more spores. Famously, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis parasitizes ants and changes their behavior so it can spread its spores.

“I mainly use iNaturalist to ease identification and register every species that crosses my way,” says Diana (above), “[and] I definitely think that iNaturalist changed my way to see our natural world. 

Since I became a member of this community I got into the habit of registering everything I see and I became more interested in plants, insects and fungi. Furthermore, I now think  that citizen science has surpassed our expectations of what it was capable of...it is a novel key tool for monitoring endangered, endemic and invasive species.

Some of Diana’s quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.

- BBC’s segment depicting Ophiocordyceps infecting ants is a classic.

- Fly death fungus is also a thing!

Our Observation of the Week is the first Arctic Burrowing Anemone (Halcampa arctica) posted to iNaturalist, seen in Svalbard and Jan Mayen by @heather340!

As a child growing up in Maine, Heather Glon was surrounded by family members who were gardeners and birders, and who loved to be outside. Heather herself explored the woods and the beach, and eventually majored in marine biology. She’s now “in my fourth year of my PhD at the Ohio State University studying the biogeography and systematics of sea anemones. 

Though my research is mainly focused on one particular genus, Metridium, I am always on the lookout for other sea anemone species to collect or document, since oftentimes someone else in the lab or a collaborator needs a certain species for their research.

While participating in a recent six week course on Svalbard, Heather heard about a nearby shore dive “[that] had fields of Halcampa arctica.

As my advisor and a labmate are working within this group of anemones for their research, I was anxious to go and collect them a specimen or two!...However, even though the site was easy to access by taking a taxi, we did have to bring along a friend with a rifle and flare gun to be on shore duty, since you are required to have a gun outside of the town limits due to the presence of polar bears in the area. 

Anyways, we started finding the anemones in about 2 meters depth of water, which made for a very easy dive! I was able to collect a few specimens as well as take plenty of photographs, so I was thrilled to be able to have that experience.

Like other anemones, Halcampa arctica has a ring of stinging tentacles surrounding its mouth (which, to put it delicately, is the only entrance and exit of its digestive system). But unlike many of sea anemones , it does not latch onto a hard surface with a pedal disc. It instead burrows into soft sediment to keep itself in place. As Heather described, they can be abundant in some areas, such as in the field seen in this photo. 

Heather (above right, with her dive buddy Ivan at the dive site) tells me she uses iNat “both my research and for personal documentation/ID help on things that I see.” The species she studies, Metridium senile, is pretty common, so Heather will look for iNat observations before a collection trip, and has asked other users to send her some specimens if she’s unable to visit an area. She’s also been in contact with other anemone researchers about her own observations, 

and now we (along with another iNaturalist user) are putting together a manuscript regarding those observations. It’s been fantastic seeing iNaturalist evolve as an essential tool in the toolkit for my PhD research! I have plans to incorporate it into future outreach, as well as integrating it into my teaching with students here at Ohio State to further engage them in the natural world around them.  

Photo of Heather by Jan Phillipp Geissel. 

- You can check out Heather’s website here, and her Sea Anemones of the World project here.

- Longyearbyen Dykkerklubb provided the equipment for Heather’s dive buddy Ivan, and more photos from this dive are posted on their Facebook page. 

Just a note that I will be cross-posting Observation of the Week blogs to both iNat's blog and to this project's journal. As Observation of the Week is pretty much always drawn from Observations of the Day, I think it makes sense. What do you all think?

This peacock mantis shrimp, seen off of Mozambique by @jennykeeping, is our Observation of the Week!

“Since I started diving in 2012, the marine world has had me captivated,” says Jenny (aka @jennykeeping). Jenny tells me she has always been interested in nature, but her current research (for her master’s degree) focuses on “the stingray species of Southern Mozambique, and so stingrays and elasmobranchs in general are my primary scope of interest. But honestly, if it's underwater then I want to know more about it!”

While the mantis shrimp Jenny photographed might be a once-in-a-lifetime sight for many of us more terrestrial folk, she says that

the peacock mantis shrimp is a common sighting in Tofo, Mozambique. Especially on our shallow (<16m) sites we have these colourful charismatic critters scurrying all over the reef and tucking themselves in to a hole, but curious enough to then poke their heads back out in this inquisitive pose, like has been captured in this photo.

Despite their common name, mantis shrimps are technically not “shrimp” as we commonly think of them (which belong in the infraorder Caridea), but are part of a separate taxonomic group, the order Stomatopoda. Oh, and they’re also definitely not mantids. Not only do they have some of the most complex visual organs of any known creature, mantis shrimps use their forelimbs to strike prey with incredible speed, creating cavitation bubbles in the water! I could go on, but The Oatmeal has already, in cartoon form, famously shown how crazy awesome these creatures are, so check it out.  

“I have been using iNaturalist to help in the identification of the marine creatures we see here in southern Mozambique, but I also enjoy the daily email updates to see what observations have been made, especially of stingrays, all over the world,” says Jenny (above, in her preferred environs).

It is helping me to learn how to critically look at the identifying features of marine species, especially elasmobranchs and stingrays. There are such intricate details that can tell a species a part it's really a skill I admire in the ID pros in iNaturalist. I also then find myself using the interactive map a lot to explore species distributions, whilst also dreaming of my next diving destination!

- by Tony Iwane. Photo of Jenny by Steven Scagnelli.

- How do mantis shrimps strike so quickly? Dr. Sheila Patek explains in a TED Talk. 

- BBC’s Earth Unplugged team tries to get slow motion footage of a mantis shrimp. 

- Here are all faved Stomatopoda observations on iNat!