Our Observation of the Week is this Pleurothallis phyllocardioides orchid, seen in Costa Rica by @jessieaguilar! 

Born in Costa Rica, Jessie Aguilar feels very lucky to be from a place full of biodiversity and beauty. 

Since I was very young I remember having an immense curiosity for the natural world and was very lucky to grow up with abundant wildlife and lush tropical vegetation around our home. My father's love for his garden inspired me to have a particular interest in plants and eventually botany became my specialty with a special interest in Montane Cloud Forest species that include trees in the generas Quercus and Ocotea as well as plants in the family Ericaceae and orchids in the generas Pleurothallis, Stelis, Scaphyglottis, and Lepanthes (which can be so tiny that can very easily go unnoticed).

For the past eleven years or so, Jessie and her husband (an ornithologist) have lived in Costa Rica’s Tilarán Mountain Range, next to the Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve and the Children's Eternal Rainforest. It’s a very biodiverse place, and her yard now also includes this little Pleurothallis phyllocardioides orchid, “growing as an epiphyte in a little hidden corner.”

Jessie had a tough time getting a proper identification at first, but iNat user Kevin W. Holcomb (@kh_orchid) helped narrow it down with her, especially after she took some more photographs of the flower’s lip. You can see the discussion on the observation itself. There are hundreds of species in the genus Pleurothallis, and they occur from Mexico into South America and also the Caribbean. 

 “Being married to an ornithologist also awoke my appreciation and interest in birds and we’ve documented 238 species in our yard alone,” says Jessie (above). The two run a little coffee farm and also take photos and conduct research in the area. Their camera traps have photographed both a male jaguar and a melanistic clouded tiger-cat (see photos below).

Historically, the remoteness of our area created a black hole of missing information in the country as so few people spend time in the forest here. I was looking for a way to keep track of the species and data we were gathering and luckily about a year ago I found iNaturalist, the perfect tool for the job!

(Cat photos by Jessie Aguilar and Seth Beaudreault.)

- check out the beauty and diversity of Pleurothallis!

Happy August everyone! Apologies for the late arrival of these July highlights. With northern hemisphere summer in full swing, it was very hard cutting this one down to a manageable number. If you’d like to catch up on highlights from the previous month you can do so here.

Species Discoveries

A. In Angola, @craigpeter’s observation of a scarab is the only record and first living photograph since the species was first collected in 2017. It helped inform the species description here.

B. In Australia, @thebeachcomber, @wcornwell and colleagues have been using iNaturalist to fill first living photograph gaps in the Australian Flora. Their paper this month describes their progress.

Range Extensions

C. In North Carolina, @sam_blue and others resurveyed the northernmost population of Pine Woods Littersnake as described in their paper.

D. In England, @regan98646 and colleagues used iNaturalist observations of Jersey Tiger like this one by @megxkat to reveal range extensions into urban areas unnoticed by traditional monitoring.

E. In South Carolina, @whiteoak and colleagues recount how @picbor’s observation was identified by @ungberg as a new population of the threatened Golden Sedge.

Invasive Species Science

In this Salon article, Robert Venette from the United States Department of Agriculture explains: "reporting new finds of invasive species is incredibly important. Free cell phone apps, like iNaturalist, make it pretty easy, even for amateurs." Here are three examples on how iNaturalist is helping locate and manage invasive species.

F. In Australia, @eroger and colleagues from the Australian government describe how iNaturalist provided them with 150 biosecurity alerts in 12-months including this first public record of an invasive cactus by @darren_fielder.

G. In South Africa, @ruanveldt explains how his German Common Yellowjacket Invasion project is helping monitor and manage this introduced wasp.

H. In Hawaii, @kevinfaccenda describes in this paper how access to global expertise such as this Nursery Bittercress ID by @ajwright is helping better understand Hawaii’s introduced flora. This global scope is one of the reasons iNaturalist is such a powerful tool for tracking invasive species.

Conservation

iNaturalist is a critical tool for conservation by helping managers understand how distributions and communities are changing over time. This month, ESRI, a GIS platform used by thousands of governments and land managers, integrated a subset of iNaturalist observations into the ArcGIS Living Atlas making these data even more accessible to the conservation community.

I. In New Zealand, @williambrockelsby and colleagues published a study describing their moth monitoring project to understand how the community has changed since initial surveys 100 years ago.

J. In Connecticut, @tammor learned that some rare ferns actually prefer microclimates provided in urban habitat. You can read the study here.

K. In California, @azoologist and colleagues use iNaturalist observations of Western Black-headed Snake like this one by @temminicki to make an updated distribution map and explore how our understanding of the distribution of this snake has changed over time.

Climate Change

L. In the southwest US, @jbyoder and colleagues used over 10,000 iNaturalist images of flowering Joshua Tree’s such as these by @brewbooks, @matt_bristol, @gregg29, and @karinp111 to reconstruct 120 years of climate change impacts on flowering phenology.

M. In Australia, this article describes mass migrations of spider crab’s into shallow waters driven by unusual upwellings and tracked by the Spider Crab Watch project via observations like this one by @spikes68

N. In Vancouver Canada, observations like this one by @erichabisch were used in this article to describe how a wet cool spring has plummeted the proportion of butterfly observations relative to all insects to 5% compared with 11% last year.

iEcology

O. In Uganda, @bwarner03, @maxallen and colleagues used inaturalist images like this one from @nikborrow to understand color aberration in malachite kingfishers.

P. In this paper by @caseydunn and colleagues, iNaturalist images of Portugues man-o’-war from around the world such as these by @mrpopp, @andrewgillespie, @twan3253, and @william_stephens were used to identify morphologically distinct subpopulations within this globally distributed species.

AI Naturalist

Q. AI is playing an increasing role in supporting iEcology studies that leverage patterns in images like the examples above. In this paper, the authors used iNaturalist images like this one from @soenkebonde to train models that automatically segment and extract color from species in the photos.

Bioblitzes and Events

R. National Moth Week was the biggest ever on iNaturalist this year with over 30,000 participants sharing over 200,000 observations representing nearly 10,000 species. There was great coverage in the media such as this article in EntomologyToday and events held around the world such as this gathering organized by @mollymjacobson in upstate New York.

Other July bioblitzes we’re highlighting this month were:

• In Canada, the Big Backyard Bioblitz covered here.
• In Nantucket, the 2024 Nantucket Bioblitz covered here.
• In Texas, the Fishes of Texas Bioblitz covered here.
• In Florida, the Snail Search Bioblitz covered here.

Restoration and Stewardship

S. In Canada, this story describes @brad22682 and colleagues at the Gorge Waterway Action Society efforts to “renaturalize” a portion of Gorge Creek that was once home to volleyball courts and swimming pools. Observations by @bryn_ and many others are helping track restoration progress.

Elsewhere in Canada, we saw iNaturalist community efforts to restore native vegetation by removing invasive Himalayan Balsam and efforts to decrease threatened Western Painted Turtles mortality by restoring fragmented habitats.

In Florida, we highlight iNaturalist projects to make lawns better habitat for pollinators. In Oregon, we highlight iNaturalist's role in efforts to restore kelp forests.

iNaturalist in the Classroom

T. In Malaysia, this paper describes @mohd_amli, @annaahmad, @muniratul_husna, and colleagues at the Universiti Teknologi MARA’s efforts to incorporate iNaturalist into their curriculum by organizing student bioblitzes like this one attended by @damya and others.

This paper describes how Seek by iNaturalist in the classroom can help meet Next Generation Science Standards.

iNaturalist and Human Health

U. Connection to nature is essential to human wellbeing. In Australia, @hollykirk and colleagues used iNaturalist data to explore how people access nature. Their paper highlights the importance of informal green spaces like railway and utility easements. Interestingly, this PNAS paper used similar methods to measure tourism outcomes in African protected areas.

Other highlights on the intersection of iNaturalist and human health included:

• This story on foraging as a tool for connecting people to nature by @naturesyear.
• This study on iNaturalist as a tool for monitoring human-mosquito interactions for public health.
• This study on iNaturalist for improving Chilean Hazelnut agriculture.

iNatters in the News

V. In California, don’t miss iNaturalist team members @kueda and @tiwane on Bay Nature: Ask the Naturalist.

W. We loved this story by @emilymstone on the humble but beautiful common butterwort.

X. In Bhutan, congratulations to @birkha for publishing “Butterflies of Tsirang”, a great example of leveraging the iNaturalist community to create urgently needed field resources.

Y. Check out this video where @charlespaxton shares using iNaturalist at the Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Z. In Utah, @crothfels and @juliahobbie were quoted in this story on intermountain botanical forays with iNaturalist.

Thank you to everyone who participated on iNaturalist this July! You can become an iNaturalist supporter by clicking the link below:

Donate to iNaturalist

Each member of the iNaturalist community makes unique contributions to our global understanding of biodiversity by adding observations and/or identifications. Have you thought about your iNaturalist account as a digital legacy to secure?

August is Make-A-Will Month, which makes this a great time to create a clear plan for your iNaturalist account and your other assets.

iNaturalist has partnered with FreeWill to make it free and easy to complete your estate planning for people in the United States.

There are two key areas to consider:

1. Securing your iNaturalist account for maximum impact

Your iNaturalist account should be treated as a digital asset in your will and any other estate planning documents. You should describe your wishes for your iNaturalist account, and most importantly, who should be the person to fulfill them. Clarity is important so that your iNaturalist account is set up for maximum long-term impact and isn’t deleted by a well-intentioned person.

In FreeWill, in the section called “gifts” you enter your iNaturalist account as a “property” (the type is “digital”). We recommend you designate loved ones as the primary and contingent beneficiaries for your iNaturalist account. You can unambiguously describe it with these details:

Website: https://www.inaturalist.org
Username: [your username]
User id: [your numeric user id] - (you can find this in the URL of your profile)
Associated email address: [email address]
[Include any guidance, which may include changing some settings for maximum long-term impact]

Outside the United States, you’ll need to consult other resources to make sure that your wishes are legally binding.

2. Supporting loved ones and causes you care about

It’s essential to consider your loved ones in the process of estate planning, including your pets. Many people also take the opportunity to designate charitable gifts to causes that are important to them. We encourage you to consider how gifts from your estate can support biodiversity.

FreeWill makes it easy to designate iNaturalist or any other US nonprofit organization as a primary or contingent beneficiary of your estate. You can choose to either notify the organization about your gift intentions or not.

Create my free will or trust

Nothing you create on FreeWill is binding until it’s signed, so you can take a look even if you’re just curious.

We hope that you will explore these free resources to ensure that your contributions to understanding biodiversity through iNaturalist are secured for the future.

Our Observation of the Week is this Praearthromyces corneri fungus, seen in Malaysia by @gim-siew_tan!

Gim Siew Tan is a remarkable fungus and slime mold photographer who hails from Malaysia. She enjoys hiking and “taking in the beauty of the outdoors,” and started noticing many of the fungi living in the forests. Starting her photography hobby with her smartphone, she now “specialize[s] in extreme macro photography, especially with slime molds, and as a citizen scientist.”

Across her many hikes, she has come across Praearthromyces corneri before, in 2023, but says

I wasn't expecting to see it in this nearby forest park that I frequent. With the distinctive gill shape and concave, shallow depression in the cap, this species is really lovely. I intended to capture the mushroom's attachment of some parts to the leaves in its natural environment since I considered that to be quite interesting.

Praearthromyces corneri was described back in 2022 and, iNat being the amazing community it is, one of the paper’s coauthors, @lennartvdpeppel, commented on Gim Siew Tan’s post and was kind enough to write a few paragraphs about it for us. 

The mushroom of Praearthromyces corneri is easy to recognize in the field because of its typical cup-shaped cap with black, gray and white zones. In the dark zones, chains of asexual spores (called arthroconidia) are produced (a trait that is very rare in mushroom-forming fungi!). Another typical feature of this mushroom is the long rooting stipe (called a pseudorhiza). This species shows resemblance to a species described by the British mycologist E.J.H. Corner. However, we could not confirm whether it is the exact same species, therefore we described it as a new species but named it after Corner. 

Praearthromyces corneri is part of an interesting group of fungi, some of which are associated with insects. By sequencing the DNA of several different species, we found that the genus Praearthomyces is closely related to the neotropical genus Arthromyces. Both Praearthomyces and Arthromyces are closely related to the genus Termitomyces, which is cultivated by termites. The termites grow Termitomyces fungi in their nest as a source of food. Like P. corneri, species of Arthromyces also have a rooting stipe. We discovered that when we carefully dug out the rooting stipe of Arthromyces, it was attached to a mass of insect fecal pellets. Since Arthromyces and Termitomyces are both associated with insects and share several other traits, including the rooting stipe, we concluded that their common ancestor must have been predisposed towards domestication by termites. 

We have not been able to confirm an insect-association for P. corneri yet. But since it produces asexual spores and has the rooting stipe, we are pretty sure it also grows on insect poop. In case anyone of the iNaturalist community observes this fungus again, make sure to carefully dig out the rooting stipe and take some photos of the insect pellets in case they are there.

Gim Siew Tan (above, in China) came across iNaturalist back in 2021, and tells me

I use it mainly as a citizen scientist to document the slime molds and mushrooms that I find in Malaysia. Also, there isn't much information available with regard to slime molds in Malaysia; thus, iNat is an ideal place for me to establish a database. I've since become a slower hiker, becoming more aware of my surroundings, and enjoying the smaller things in life and whatever I may discover as I pass by.

(Photo of Gim Siew Tan taken by CS Cheah. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- check out Gim Siew Tan’s Instagram page!

- this observation of beetle-related fungus by @cgmayers was an Observation of the Day last year!

- is it just me, or do these mushroom photos remind you of the opening shot of The Prestige?

We released a new computer vision model today. It has 1,773 new taxa (90,290 taxa up from 88,517). This new model (v2.14) was trained on data exported on May 12, 2024.

Here's a graph of the models release schedule since early 2022 (segments extend from data export date to model release date) and how the number of species included in each model has increased over time.

The graph below shows model accuracy estimates using 1,000 random Research Grade observations in each group not seen during training time. The paired bars below compare average accuracy of model 2.13 with the new model 2.14. Each bar shows the accuracy from Computer Vision alone (dark green) and Computer Vision + Geo (green). Overall the average accuracy of 2.14 is 89.2% (statistically the same as 2.13 at 89.1% - as described here we probably expect ~2% variance all other things being equal among experiments).

Here is a sample of new species added to v2.14:

• Aves
• Plantae
• Fungi
• Reptilia
• Amphibia
• Other Animalia
• Mollusca
• Mammalia
• Actinopterygii
• Insecta
• Protozoa
• Chromista
• Arachnida

We apologize for the delay in releasing v2.14. But this means that v2.15 (which we kicked off today) will probably add more than 3k species. If we can continue at this rate, we're on track to break 100,000 species in the model in early 2025!

This is the twenty-fifth entry in an ongoing monthly (or kind of monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

When it comes to the word “sphagnum,” I suspect my first encounter with it came the same way most other people initially saw it: marketed as something you can use to retain moisture for potted plants. The genus Sphagnum, however, consists of well over 300 known species of moss, and many of them are vital to ecosystems like peat bogs. They’re also quite beautiful. 

Paul Lamkowski, who’s identified nearly 8,000 Sphagnum observations on iNaturalist, first remembers when he was bitten by the bryophyte bug. 

It was while on an unplanned visit to a small peatland near my home city. Looking back on it now, this mire was small and in bad shape, but back then I was fascinated to stand on a carpet of wine-red Sphagnum divinum among grey-yellow autumn grasses, under a grey sky. This moment stuck with me because I was surprised how much colour these little mosses can provide to any landscape. With this initial start, I happily accepted the task to genotype Sphagnum for a research project at Greifswald University, which then became the subject of my master thesis.

Now a PhD student at the University of Greifswald, Paul continues to study this group and he’s focusing on population genetics and evolution ecology. His goal is to see the approximately 350 species of Sphagnales worldwide, as well as collect and culture them. 

While he doesn’t remember exactly how he came across iNaturalist, Paul tells me it’s become “a great tool for ‘remote studying’ this group…

I like to train myself [by identifying on iNaturalist]. Seeing certain taxa repeatedly helps my memory. It is the same benefit I gain by observing exotic species not only once in my life but on a weekly basis at the world's biggest community for this group, the Sphagnum Diversity Centre Uelzen, which I founded back in 2019. In both cases I see species under different environmental conditions, in different seasons and in different regional forms.

Most descriptions of Sphagnales are from well-known areas and there is no doubt that many species are yet to be discovered. Even in Europe the last decades shew new species such Sphagnum skyense from the British Isles or Sphagnum beothuk from eastern North America and western Europe. Who knows what is hiding in the remote islands of southern Andes, the high mountains of central Africa or the extreme Arctic and Antarctic? The good thing is, that we do not know the world as well as we like to believe, and this keeps me going forward and things exciting. Even the “clean up” is exciting, when relocating a taxon, which has been collected 30, 40 or 50 years ago once in history. Generally said, it is treasure hunting.

Whenever I see something strange or unexpected, I mark the observation on iNaturalist. Often I ask for more information because I intend to visit such sites in the future - if possible. I now have a huge to-do list for all continents. I also enjoy the feeling of getting to know people all over the world, often bound by a passion for bryophytes. Meeting them after years of seeing them online always makes me happy.

Like most (all?) mosses, identification of Sphagnums to the species level, without shots taken with a microscope, is very difficult. “[On iNaturalist], it’s often that only macroscopic photos are provided, leading to identifications only to subgenus level. But even with good microscopic photos, the variability of Sphagnum often is too high to be sure about its identity.” 

However, that doesn’t mean macroscopic photos are useless, and Paul says the lack of macroscopic photos in existing literature can make it difficult to find some species in the field.

I remember well when I first tried to find Sphagnum obtusum. I visited sites 800 km from where I was living, took many samples where I thought “this looks like it”. They all turned out to be interesting, but not the Sphagnum obtusum I’d been looking for. Why was that? 

There were only a few macroscopic photos of this species in books and the internet and thus my eye had no clue what to look for in the field. After this trip in late autumn I wrote to a Finnish colleague during the Christmas holidays, asked them to send me photos of Sphagnum obtusum, and I was shocked when I received them: had I not collected exactly that kind of moss in Central Germany and put it into culture as “the biggest Sphagnum fallax I have ever seen”? I ran out into the snow, compared the sample and the given photo, and one of Germany’s leading bryologists confirmed its ID as Sphagnum obtusum. I now had it literally in my hand as well as a usable understanding of what it looked like. From that day on, knowing it in the field and knowing the right staining for the microscopic identification, I found the species, which was by the way thought to be close to extinction in northwest Germany, in many and often large populations.

As you can see, it’s often necessary to have microscopic photos to confirm Sphagnum species, but nobody has the time to check and find the one rare specimen out of a thousand samples. For this, macroscopic photos are necessary, and I take those on my research trips around the world. When my PhD is finished, I plan to start working on a book to make these beautiful mosses more accessible to everybody.

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

Found some Sphagnum and want to take photos that will give you a good chance for identification? Here’s Paul’s advice:

- first of all, document the habitat, too. In a morphologically variable group as Sphagnum, it is important to know where the plants are growing. Attached to a cliff, on damp forest ground or in a hollow full of water? With such information some general trends in morphology can be evaluated differently.

- try to make close-ups of the capitulum (which looks like a flowering alpine edelweiss), the branches, and the so-called stem leaves. Sphagnum mostly displays a very peculiar leaf dimorphism, thus the leaves on the central stem are often uniquely shaped and an important trait. The stem is easily found removing the capitulum and branches from the centre column.

- finally, a nice group portrait of the moss is needed to get an overview. Often nearby plants or other mosses are usable for size comparison. I personally use a forensic scale on all my photos.

- if possible, the location should be public because many similar species have different ranges. Not knowing the location leads to a lot of uncertainty in such a species-rich group.

- if you’re able to take microscopic photos that’s great, but let us be honest: who cares about this when the dark red cushion of a Sphagnum warnstorfii is in front of us? After all it is the macroscopic traits which make the Sphagnales so attractive!

- here’s a short video that shows some Sphagnum in situ, as well as a diagram of its structure.

- and another short video, explaining how peat bogs form.

This week iNaturalist passed another big observation milestone: 200,000,000 verifiable observations! It took iNaturalist 14 years to reach 100 million and just 2 more years to reach 200 million.

If each observation were a coin, the stack would be almost 200 miles high.

If each observation were a minute, we could spin the clock back to the year 1644.

If each observation were a horse, that would be 3 times as many horses as are on Earth today.

Let’s take a closer look at these observations as 200 dots where each represents 1 million observations.

Imagine 200 million observations are represented by 200 dots

133 of the 200 dots are of plants and insects. Fish are represented by just 2 dots.

How many dots from each species category?

114 of the 200 dots are from in North America. Africa and South America have the fewest dots.

How many dots are from each continent?

The graph below shows the number of observations posted each month since iNaturalist was launched in 2008. The number of observations has continued to grow each year breaking 6 million observations per month for the first time this year.

Observations Over Time

This map shows the number of observations by country. Just under half of all iNaturalist observations are from the United States.

Observations by Country

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the 200 million observations and helped identify them! More than 90 million of these records are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which has led to more than 5000 publications.

If you want to look back at how we celebrated past observation milestones, you can read about 150 million, 100 million, 50 million, 25 million and 15 million.

Observations and identifications are the social currency of iNaturalist that keeps the community thriving. If you’d also like to financially support the non-profit operations behind-the-scenes, you can make a gift in dozens of currencies.

Donate $5

Thank you for everything that you do to support iNaturalist!

Our Observation of the Week is this undescribed beetle in the tribe Colobotheini, seen in Colombia by @diegoamaya!

Diego Amaya is a botanist who’s currently at the National University of Colombia. Diego’s work is in the systematics, taxonomy and phylogenetics of angiosperms, and focuses on the family Campanulaceae. Last December, while searching for a member of that family, Siphocampylus bogotensis, he came across the beetle you see above.

That day I went with a friend who is interested in insects, so I was more attentive than usual, taking pictures of every insect I saw.

We were on a road that goes down an elevation gradient to link high areas of the western escarpment of Cundinamarca, with low areas in the inter-Andean valleys. This road is known as the Gualivá Reserve and is the most diverse and beautiful point (as far as I am concerned) of my hometown, Facatativá.

Diego posted a photo of the beetle to iNaturalist and originally identified it as a member of the net-winged beetle family (Lycidae), which it resembles, but Colombian entomologist @extasiptera corrected him, identifying it as a long-horned beetle (Cerambycidae) - a completely different family!

iNat beetle identifier extraordinaire @borisb identified it to tribe Colobotheini, and then 15 days ago, noted that it’s likely an undescribed species in or related to the genus Confluentia! I reached out to Boris, and he told me

I have compared this beetle with all described species illustrated on this site. Genera Allocarterica, Batesparna, Carterica, Confluentia, Francisparna, Piriana, and Sparna contain Lycidae mimics exclusively, a few also found within Sangaris. None has a colour pattern that approaches the present one: median area of elytra with dark crossband, instead of pale there. A minor difference in pattern would not indicate a “new” species, because mimics are notoriously variable - a prerequisite for evolution into a mimic.

There are a lot more Longhorn beetles with Lycid colouration in the Neotropics, partly with antennae optically dilated in the basal half by dense fringes of hair, which contribute to Lycid , such as https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/29266366 and chromatic interruption of antennae can also be observed here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14476349 (in this case, probably derived from a non-mimic ancestor with “signal antennae” (white tips / intermediate segments - a nearly 100% tropical phenomenon of unclear relevance).

Diego (above, with a species of Drymonia that is under description) says that he’s loved nature since he was a child and explored the Colombian Andes. He was originally into insects and snakes, but of course ended up studying plants. His current work is under Professor Laura Clavijo, director of the Colombian National Herbarium.

Diego was introduced to iNat in 2017, by one of his professors, who was teaching them about citizen science tools. 

By the time the project was over, I was hooked and didn’t want to leave this great app. For a while, including the pandemic, I used iNaturalist as a tool to help identify observations, and at the same time it helped me to polish my taxonomic skills without leaving home, to the point of becoming a curator in the app. 

Once I was able to return to the field, my passion for photography took over, and iNaturalist became a diary, not only to corroborate IDs, but also to organize my photos and tours. Such has been the impact of iNaturalist in my professional life that it’s brought me several great moments. For example I made the first live records of a moth in more than 100 years. And even uploading observations and contacting expert taxonomists has led me to describing a new species of plant, thanks to these knowledge networks.

(Photo of Diego by Felipe Mesa. Some quotes have been edited for clarity.)

- you can follow Diego on Instagram here!

- @borisb’s work has also led to another beetle Observation of the Week!

- both net-winged beetles and long-horned beetles can be quite showy, check out the most-faved observations of each family here and here!

Our Observation of the Week is this remarkable scene captured by @cumaliyesil in Turkey: a female Goblet-marked Damselfly (Erythromma lindenii) with a male’s dismembered abdomen still attached to her body!

Cumali Yeşil credits the Libellen-Freunde Facebook group with really inspiring his passion for odonates (dragonflies and damselflies), particularly members Hartwig Stobbe and Jörg Teumer. He also heard about iNaturalist there, and joined up.

Being able to learn about all the living creatures from India to America instantly, being in the first place that scientific researchers and expert's identify species, as well as their deep knowledge and interest on the issue has increased my admiration of nature. I love being in nature and being with my family in my spare time.

Before heading to the Beyşehir district last month, Cumali checked out iNaturalist and wanted to observe goblet-marked damselflies, hoping to see how climate change has affected them. 

There was wildlife just by the thicket where people were swimming by the lake, chatting and having fun. It was a life that consisted of feeding, finding shelter, and the struggle for survival. All natural and out  in the open. To observe such wildlife has always affected me deeply.

On that day, as I was making observations, I noticed something strange by my side. I didn’t realize what it was at first, but then I was surprised and appalled as I looked closer.

A female goblet-marked damselfly was flying with a dead body of a male still attached to her! At first I tried to remove the dead body from her but I eventually had to leave her to her fate, which still saddens me. 

So how did this situation happen? Well, damselflies have a complex mating process which involves the male (in this species, males are blue) transferring a packet of sperm from the end of his abdomen to a site near the front of his abdomen. Using the cerci (or claspers) on the end of his abdomen he grabs the female behind her head. The female then arches the tip of her abdomen to pick up the sperm packet, making a heart or wheel shape. When she oviposits (or lays eggs), he either guards her from other males by hovering nearby or will continue to hold her with his cerci.

So what happened here? It’s likely that a predator such as a bird struck the male while he was still attached to the female, taking only his head and thorax and leaving the abdomen. Odonate expert @boudot_jp confirms that this does happen and has a photo of it in his book. I also reached out to @ronan_a, who told me

This gives us an idea of ​​the precision of attachment of the cerci on the female so that a connection is maintained as they move. I don't know if it is linked to an active unlocking system (requiring an action from the male) or to a particular engagement/disengagement movement. 

I've seen similar photos before…but I've never seen it myself in the field. It seems that, for European (and probably Palearctic and Nearctic) damselflies, this is quite specific to the Coenagrionidae family. 

A high school German language teacher, Cumali (above) tells me that the semi-aquatic life history of odonates is what attracted him to them. 

It’s inspired me to raise awareness in the community about the picnics or off-road races in the canyons where I make my observations. To further this, I have decided to to save and create odonate habitats with volunteer students at my school.

Even though my profession is not biology, my interest in biology and the anatomy of odonates continues to grow every day. The biggest contribution to my idea was mostly with the members in iNaturalist and their observations of different living species.

(Some quotes have been edited for clarity and flow.)

- PBS Deep Look has a great damselfly reproduction video.

- check out our profile of odonate identifier @@amila_sumanapala!

That’s right, more caterpillar content!

For the past two springs, a few of us here at iNat - myself, Ken-ichi Ueda, and iNat Board member Cat Chang, as well as some other California naturalists - have had the privilege of joining University of Connecticut professor Dave Wagner and other researchers from the California Academy of Sciences and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History as they searched the deserts of the American southwest for caterpillars. Prof. Wagner is the author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America and for years has been working on a companion volume that covers the western half of the continent.

As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her profile of Prof. Wagner, he likes to travel with a bunch of helpers and he’s enlisted Laura Gaudette (@gaudettelaura), a collections volunteer with the University of Florida’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, for some of these trips. It was amazing to watch her and all the other researchers stay up late into the night documenting and organizing their finds. 

Laura’s a long-time iNatter, and was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat and discuss her use of iNat and the work this group is doing. I hope you enjoy!

- if you're not a specialist but want to help get observations in front of those who are, you can use the Identify tool to refine observations!

- and you can also use the Identify page to annotate observations, such as labeling lepidoptera observations as adults, caterpillars, pupae, or eggs. Here's a search for all lepidoptera that are missing a Life Stage annotation.