10,000 - iNaturalist and me

I recently passed 10,000 species ('distinct taxa'), and thought it would be a nice time to write my first iNat journal entry.

I had heard of iNaturalist during my bachelors but unfortunately never really got around to uploading anything. In 2018, after finishing, I was travelling in Tanzania and decided to start taking photos for iNaturalist. I wanted my first observation to be good, and I was lucky enough to have come across this caecilian that fit the bill: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13544745. I kept taking photos sporadically over the next couple of years, but didn't really have the motivation to sort through and upload them.

In 2020 when the Covid lockdowns hit I decided to go through all of my old photos, going back to those I took with my first digital camera when I was 12. I had always been mostly interested in taking photos of cool insects or flowers I saw, so there was a lot to go through. I had also gotten it into my head to have one observation per species, which slowed me down a bit because I had to keep track myself as the species count function doesn't really work like that. As I uploaded more and more my obsession grew and I started being more deliberate about my present-day photo taking, going our specifically on bouts of iNaturalisting. I was in Panama at the time, and the possibilities seemed limitless. Every time I went out, even just to a pond near my house, I would see something new. Eventually I realized that I was among the top iNaturalisters in Panama, and decided to hit #1 in number of species observed before I left in October 2020 (something I achieved and maintained since then).

I was learning so much! The simple act of putting names to 'faces', and keeping track of the different faces I've seen, helped me appreciate so many new lifeforms I had not given too much thought to before. It was also exciting discovering species for which there were no observations on iNaturalist yet, or no photos anywhere. My learning took the next leap when I started identifying things. I decided to set some boundaries for myself based on what I was most familiar with: frogs of Panama and anything from Hawaii. I have expanded a bit since then, but still mostly identify these things. My Hawaii identifications in particular were super insightful - I had seen the greater whole growing up there, but now I realized that it was composed of many intricate pieces. When I finally returned, it was like seeing everything for the first time, a veil had been lifted from my eyes. What were once just all 'plants' were now particular endemic species, with particular life histories, traditional uses, ecological relationships.

iNaturalist has continued changing the way I see the world, taking off one veil after another. Before iNaturalist I saw the plant kingdom only in the coarsest of ways - that's a tree, that's a fern, that's a flower, and I knew a handful of edible species. Now I can identify hundreds of plant species, and have used iNaturalist to help identify more for work. My next veil came off in Alaska in 2023: plant pathogens! I discovered that not only do the spots I see on leaves have names, they can often be identified to species if I know the host plant. The relatively low plant diversity in Alaska, and its similarity to northern European flora, helped me discover for myself over a hundred fungi and insects parasitizing Alaskan plants. I started the 'Plant Pathogens of Alaska' iNaturalist project to keep track of all the various rusts, mildews, leaf-miners and other parasites I found: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/plant-pathogens-of-alaska

At one point I decided on a goal for myself: one species for each day of my life. I generously gave myself 100 years to live. I wasn't very productive my first 15 years of life when it comes to documenting species, and I expect I'll have to slow down for my last 15 as well, but I still have a good amount of time to find my 36,500 species. Now, a bit less than a third of the way there, I see so much potential. So much of the world I haven't yet seen, and so many species hiding under my nose in my most familiar places!

Posted on October 5, 2024 02:17 AM by hubertszcz