This Dynastor darius ssp. stygianus butterfly seen by magazhu in Yelapa, Mexico is our Observation of the Week!

Raised in a bilingual household in Mexico City by an American “chemical engineer/researcher/pianist father and a Mexican translator interpreter/Flamenco dancer mother,” Cheryl Harleston (@magazhu) has always had an interest in animals, and worked with Bengal tigers and as a large species veterinary assistant. However it’s her sighting of a butterfly, Dynastor darius ssp. stygianus, and its tiny eggs and larvae, that is our Observation of the Week.

Since 2003 Cheryl has been living in the remote town of Yelapa, in Mexico’s Jalisco state. After falling ill last year she forced herself to take walks around the untouched jungle of her backyard. “Thanks to the very slow steps I had to take I could notice many more things than usual, so to make it more interesting I started shooting anything I encountered with a cheap little camera I had,” she says. Her natural curiosity about the animals she encountered led her to iNaturalist, where she has uploaded over 2,800 observations in just over a year!

On November 12th she noticed a large butterfly laying eggs on some pineapple plants, so she posted photos of it to iNaturalist. NaturaLista lepidoptera curator Hugo Alvarez (@hugoalvarezg) identified it as Dynastor darius ssp. stygianus and, according the records he’s been able to find, this is the first record of it in Jalisco. He asked Cheryl to photograph the eggs and larvae so there would be documentation of this butterfly’s lifecycle - you can follow all of her photos and observations of it here. A very cool example of iNaturalist’s abilities to link naturalists of all interests and experience levels. 

(Oh, and check out the awesome snake mimicry of Darius dynastor ssp. dynastor, another subspecies of this butterfly, in its pupal phase. Whoa!)

“Thanks to iNaturalist I've also discovered that we have many protected species in this area, and even some rare ones...This has led me to work on some projects to educate the people here about our fauna,” says Cheryl, and she has begun to make informational posters to put up in her area, like the one above. “I find it very rewarding to be able to learn so much about all my animal ‘neighbors,’ and at the same time to be contributing my ‘grain of sand’ to science...it has been very exciting to follow up on [this butterfly], and I hope I'm able witness and register the complete cycle!”

- by Tony Iwane

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

This Glassy Tiger Butterfly photographed by Sanjit Debbarma in Assam, India and posted by ivijayanand is our Observation of the Week!

Dr. Vijay Anand Ismavel has been a pediatric surgeon at the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital in the Assam region of India for over 22 years, but it was a heart attack in 2008 that caused him to really notice the wildlife surrounding him in this remote area. After the heart attack,

I was asked to walk 2 kms every day. I found this tiresome and took my daughters along. One day I noticed a tapping sound and found an unfamiliar woodpecker pecking on a dead bamboo stump...I photographed it and posted it on Flickr and it was identified as a relatively rare woodpecker (Stripe-breasted woodpecker – Dendrocopos atratus). I became very interested and started noticing all sorts of interesting birds and insects...I found that observing, photographing and reporting...wildlife in the campus and surrounding areas was very relaxing and added new meaning to my walks.

Dr. Ismavel soon upgraded his camera equipment (his wife budgeted it under “Cardiac Rehabilitation Expenses”) and began taking coworkers on his nature walks, later posting their observations on iNaturalist in addition to Flickr - the Makunda Nature Club was formed! Earlier this year they went on a trek into nearby forests and were the first to photograph a van Hasselt's Sunbird in India.

The Glassy Tiger Butterfly observation was photographed by Mr. Sanjit Debbarma (Dr. Ismavel posted it for him and is working on getting everyone in the club an iNat account) during the Makunda Nature Club’s attempt to find the van Hasselt’s Sunbird again. The club plans to soon start “the Makunda Spider Survey which will document the first 100 (or more) unique spider species in the campus (and surroundings) with an eminent Indian arachnologist.” There is now even a Department of Biodiversity Documentation and Wildlife Conservation at the hospital and school.

Many of the villagers in the surrounding forest participate in deforestation and trapping, and Dr. Ismavel says

the greatest impact we foresee is in the keen interest being taken by school students...We hope to instill in these children a sense of wonder at the sheer beauty and variety of nature around them by making them members of the student wing of the Makunda Nature Club. We hope that they in turn will influence their parents and other villagers. Some of them came with us as guides on the three treks we had into deep forest. Maybe one day they would exchange their woodcutting for ecotourism and work to save the forests and their biodiversity.

It’s amazing what a photograph, an observation, and an online naturalist community can accomplish. Keep up the great work, Dr. Ismavel and the Makunda Nature Club!

This Texas Diamondback Terrapin seen by robberfly in Aransas County, Texas, is our Observation of the Week!

Ken-ichi here, guest-writing this week's OOTW. I had the very great privilege of spending the last week naturalizing parts of Texas with iNat superstars Mark Rosenstein (maractwin), Liam O'Brien (robberfly), and most importantly Greg Lasley (greglasley, who generously hosted us and showed us around his great state), and while this turtle that Liam photographed was but one of many amazing organisms we observed, it seemed significant to me for a number of reasons.

For those who don't know, the Diamondback Terrapin is a turtle of brackish coastal marshes that can be found all up and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United states, as well as around the Gulf coast. By the early 20th century they had been nearly hunted to extinction for use in turtle soup, but while they have managed to hold on (perhaps due to the decreased popularity of that dish), they remain threatened across their range due to car and boat injuries, death in crab traps, and most importantly, destruction of their coastal wetland habitats.

I grew up seeing these beautiful turtles at the Meigs Point Nature Center, Hammonasset State Beach, in Connecticut, so seeing them in Texas was like running into an old childhood friend in a faraway place. This population has special significance for iNaturalist, however, because it was first documented by Matt Muir while visiting the same spot with Greg Lasley in 2014, when it caused quite a stir in the Texas herpetological community. One herper called it his “holy grail of Texas turtles.”

“That's one of the things I love about iNaturalist,” Matt says. “Observations can be more valuable/special than one realizes in the moment, and one doesn't need to be an expert or taxonomic specialist to contribute something notable. Observe everything!”

And as you can see from Greg's observation from the same spot, several other folks from iNat have had history with these turtles in this part of the world.

To me, this was iNat at it's best: people connecting to nature through careful observation, but also connecting to our past selves through evoked memory, and connecting to each other through shared experience. This was sort of the underlying theme of this entire trip as we met up with several generations of Texas naturalists, some of whom have spent lifetimes exploring the wildlands of Texas and seemed to know not just every plant and butterfly, but plenty of people we met along the way as well, and every animal (human or otherwise) seemed to have a story. Others, like me, were completely new to the state, so every common bird and weed was a fresh experience to be greeted with our strange naturalist's combination of joy and scrutiny, the subject for new memories and stories.

It was a great trip, with great people. If you haven't already, try and find other iNat folks in your area! The more you know people in person, the better the community gets.

• by Ken-ichi Ueda

This Long-tailed Blue butterfly seen by Tamsin Carlisle in the United Arab Emirates is our Observation of the Week!

After obtaining a BA in Zoology from Oxford and a PhD in Evolutionary Ecology at UC Santa Barbara, Tamsin Carlisle had every intention of being a field biologist, but the “disruptive nature of life itself” intervened and she has since become a successful business journalist, based in Dubai and writing mainly about oil and gas.

She’s never given up on her passion for biology, however, and soon after moving to Dubai she joined the Dubai Natural History Group, a group whose members “head out of the Glitter City to explore the surrounding expanses of far-from-barren desert and mountains, along with the occasional mangrove swamp.” For the past year she’s been the Bird Recorder for the group, and began to use iNaturalist as a way for her to keep a list of her sightings, and for help with identification.

With her background in evolutionary biology, Ms. Carlisle is interested in “how new species arise and become established, why they spread or contract geographically and wink in and out of existence over time.” This led to her observation of the Long-tailed Blue butterfly, which she noticed looks and behaves similarly to another lycaenid butterfly, the the Plains Cupid (above). The former she has seen east of the rugged Hajar Mountains, and the latter she observed on the western side of them. These observations, along with two similar Lacertid lizard species divided by the mountains, has made her wonder if “a pattern [was] emerging and, if so, what role was being played by the physical barrier of the Hajar Mountains?”

With questions such as these, in “a region where fauna and flora have been incompletely inventoried and mapped,” she writes, “citizen naturalists can help.”

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

- by Tony Iwane

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

This Jewelled Gecko observed by Shane Orchard in New Zealand is our Observation of the Week - which also happens to be Conservation Week in New Zealand!

A riparian ecologist who’s often “on the lookout for interesting patterns in nature,” Shane spotted this Jewelled Gecko (Naultinus gemmeus) in a beech forest along the way to New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Jewelled Geckos are endemic to the South Island of New Zealand, and Shane says they are “distinguished by having more variation in color and pattern than any other gecko in New Zealand, with different color combinations being characteristic of the different regions!” The two main populations known are on Otago and Banks Peninsulas, with another smaller population found in Southland. In addition, they are occasionally recorded on the eastern slopes of the Southern Alps, as was the case here, and less is known about these populations.

In 2012 the Jewelled Gecko was reclassified the as “At Risk” under the New Zealand Threat Classification System in recognition of having an ongoing decline, partly due to pasture development. A more unusual threat is that these and other New Zealand geckos are targeted by wildlife smugglers, including a recent example of Jewelled Gecko smuggling that was discovered by authorities in Germany. “This is a key reason why iNaturalist observations of threatened species are automatically obscured,” explains Shane.

Shane is also a Trustee of the NZBRN Trust who has developed the NatureWatch NZ site, the regional node of the iNat network in New Zealand. The NatureWatch NZ team started off by hosting a separate instance of iNaturalist, but New Zealand developments “have now been merged back into the global iNaturalist platform and are now available for all!”

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

• by Tony Iwane

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

This colony of Straw-colored Fruit Bats observed by Martin Grimm in Tanzania is our Observation of the Week - which happens to be Bat Week!

A medical doctor from Leipzig, Germany, Martin Grimm volunteered at Tanzanian hospitals while on parental leave after his children were born. In Tanzania he would take the babies on nature walks and photograph wildlife as the babies slept, posting pictures to Flickr. That’s where Jakob Fahr, creator of the Afribats project on iNaturalist, found Martin’s photo and invited him to post it on iNat. Martin jokingly calls this first iNaturalist experience an “infection” and began to look for more bats “in villagers’ houses,...in hollow trees, in hotels. Bats can be found almost everywhere when looking close enough.” He now has 43 observations posted in the Afribats project! 

During Martin’s latest trip to Tanzania, Jakob asked that he look for some Straw-colored Fruit Bat (Eidolon helvum) colonies and estimate their numbers. After finding several outside of Dar es Salaam, Martin’s guide brought him to a colony he knew by the Goethe Institute, which is the colony pictured in this post. Jakob says they have “been studying the local movement ecology of straw-coloured fruit bats with miniaturized GPS-loggers, but their large-scale movements are still a bit of a mystery, thus documenting whether these bats are around at a given colony and time is highly valuable information that helps us disentangle their long-distance migrations.” This colony, numbering between 10,000 and 100,000 individuals, was previously unknown on Afribats and is important data for the project. 

For Jakob, the “AfriBats project strives to showcase the incredible diversity of African bats, and to put their manifold ecosystem services into the limelight rather than their role as carriers of diseases, which is largely based on speculation rather than hard facts. Martin's excellent pictures have certainly helped to illustrate both the beauty of African bats and their important ecological roles!” 

Martin continues to contribute observations of many taxa to iNaturalist, including 40 observations in the Primates of East Africa project, and has begun to document the forests surrounding Leipzig. “My goal is to get an overview of life there around the day and around the year. So I try to visit the forest often and during day and night. This changed my life as naturalist a lot - didn't do things like this before I knew iNat.”

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

- by Tony Iwane

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

A Black-throated Gray Warbler observed by Donna Pomeroy (@dpom) during the Mountain Lake & Presidio Bioblitz is our Observation of the Week. 

A Bioblitz is an intensive one-day study of biodiversity in a specific location, bringing scientists and volunteer citizen-scientists together to find and record as many species as possible. After Mountain Lake’s recent restoration, the Presidio Trust, California Academy of Sciences, and Nerds for Nature organized a grassroots, smartphone-powered inventory of the area on October 10th, 2015. 

“This baseline [inventory] not only helps the Presidio Trust keep their species list up-to-date, but it can also be used to track future change,” says Allison Young, Citizen Science Engagement Coordinator at the California Academy of Sciences. “By using iNaturalist, not only do we have a platform to compile all these bioblitz observations and make them available to managers and scientists, but it's key in making bioblitzes accessible to everyone, not just experts.” 

One participant was El Granada's California’s Donna Pomeroy, an avid birder who searched the willow thickets around Mountain Lake and “was delighted to find the two [Black-throated Gray] warblers, along with five other species of warblers.” She says that because these warblers breed in oak woodlands, their presence at Mountain Lake shows us its importance as a stopover for migrating birds. 

However, Donna’s nearly 12,000 iNaturalist observations consist of a lot more than birds - she’s recorded many other organisms, with nudibranchs, butterflies and amphibians being particular favorites. “iNaturalist has changed the way I interact with nature by enabling me to use the iNat community to help me learn new taxa. Now when I am out exploring, I take photos of many of the smaller life forms that I would have overlooked or ignored in the past,” she says. 

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing. 

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

- By Tony Iwane

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

A Sugar Maple observed by Erika Mitchell (@erikamitchell) in Washington County, Vermont is our Observation of the Week.

Self describing as “really into data” and also someone who likes to get an exercise walk in each day, this summer Erika figured, why not combine these? She tracked down a local county road map and carefully laid out a plan to walk all 80 miles of road that criss cross her town while taking iNaturalist observations along the way. Over the course of the ensuing months, Erica walked all 80 miles of road each way (160 miles round trip). “I wanted the survey to be systematic, so I set the alarm on my phone to go off every few minutes.” Erica said. “When it went off I’d stop and take observations of the three nearest trees.” But the naturalist admits mixing in a few less systematic reports “whenever I saw something really pretty like a wildflower in bloom.”

Erica, who has a PhD in linguistics and works professionally on water quality issues, got involved in natural history about 10 years ago after reading the writings of Henry David Thoreau. She learned about iNaturalist through the efforts of the iNaturalist Vermont project run by the Vermont Center for Ecosystem Studies as part of the Vermont Atlas of Life. According to Erika, “I kept hearing about iNaturalist, but once I realized that I could use it to get feedback on my observations and connect with a whole community of naturalists I got really into it”.

Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) is native to the northeastern North American Hardwood forests and is famous for being one of the primary sources of maple syrup. To produce the syrup, a hole is drilled in the trunk so that the sugary sap can drip out and be collected. As much as 40 litres of sap must be boiled down to produce just a single litre of maple syrup.

Sugar maples are deciduous meaning they loose their leaves each winter. The maple syrup sap stores energy made during the previous summer that that is mobilized in late winter to provide the branch tips the energy they need to produce leaves and flowers. This sapstream climbs up the tree utilizing xylem tissue. Another sapstream utilizes the phloem tissue to 'phlow-down' delivering sugars made from photosynthesis in the leaves during the summer to other parts of the tree. The evolution of this vascular tissue (the xylem and phloem) is one of the characters that separates vascular plants from other more ancient groups like mosses and liverworts.

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

By Scott Loarie

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

Dani Montijo (@dmontijo) and her crowd of Light-Blue Soldier Crabs (Mictyris longicarpus) were selected as iNaturalist’s Observation of the Week.

The Light-Blue Soldier Crab belongs to the Brachyuran family, Micryridae. The species ranges northward from southern New South Wales and from Perth, Western Australia, to New Caledonia in the east, to Singapore in the north, and to the Bay of Bengal in the west.

Montijo, a senior at UC Berkeley, is currently studying abroad at the University of Queensland and made her discovery on North Stradbroke Island. Though she only started using iNaturalist a few months ago, Montijo already feels like she’s learned so much in the process. What’s more, she’s been able to share that knowledge with young people.

“Over the summers I work as a counselor at a summer camp, and this last summer I used iNaturalist to identify different species around camp,” said Montijo. “Once I'd identified them, I was able to learn more about their ecology, and then pass on that knowledge to my campers. I think that's one of the great things about iNaturalist—it helps make learning about nature more accessible.”

Montijo also loves that tools like iNaturalist are at the forefront of the citizen science movement: “It [iNaturalist] helps people get involved in their environment, and helps create up-to-date maps of species distribution, which can be really valuable, especially in a world where we don't have enough scientists and resources to go around.”

As for the Light-Blue Soldier Crabs, her study abroad group had just arrived on North Stradbroke Island and was staying at a nearby research station. They went exploring by the beach, and were stunned to see the thousands upon thousands of soldier crabs running across the sand.

“It was so surreal—there were just so, so many,” said Montijo. “You could actually hear them running, the sounds of thousands of little tiny legs splashing in the shallow water, and as you walked closer to them, the sound got louder as they started running faster! Once you got too close, they'd give up on running away and just burrow straight down into the ground to get away.”

In Australia Mictyris is known as the "soldier crab." This appellation is appropriate in view of the habits of the genus. Immense numbers of M. longicarpus congregate in dense masses and wander over tidal flats in apparent formation. Their activities exert a particular fascination not only because of these huge "armies," but also because soldier crabs walk forward and not sideways, as do most crabs.

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

By Matthew Monte

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!

Fyn Kynd’s close-up of a Calico Pennant dragonfly (Celithemis elisa) has been selected as iNaturalist’s Observation of the Week.

Fyn (@fyn_kynd), an eighth grader from Searsmont, Maine, found this female specimen along the edge of a swamp on Hog Island, located in Muscongus Bay, Maine. He made the picture during the Coastal Maine Bird Studies for Teens Camp, sponsored by the Audubon Society.

When asked about his interests, the homeschooled 14-year-old said, “My favorite subjects are photography and anything in nature, whether it's mountain biking, swimming, or getting up at dawn to see migrating birds, I love it all.”

A birder at heart, Fyn says his “second loves” are butterflies and dragonflies. He’s been a nature photographer for about three years.

“I use a Canon 7D with a 400mm f/5.6 lens for my bird and dragonfly shots where I sometimes use an extension tube to let me get a little closer to my subjects,” said Fyn. “For macro I use a 50mm f/1.8 portrait lens with extension tubes.”

Celithemis elisa belongs to the order Odonata, which is divided into two suborders, Anisoptera (dragonflies) and Zygoptera (damselflies). There are approximately 407 odonate species represented in North America and >5000 worldwide.

Commonly called Pennants, Celithemis is a genus of 8 species, all native to eastern North America, where they primarily inhabit riparian ecosystems.

Because dragonflies depend on freshwater, a very at-risk ecosystem, they are often good environmental quality indicators. Dr. Viola Clausnitzer, a scientist with the IUCN’s Dragonfly Specialist Group studies dragonfly populations and their role in freshwater conservation efforts. She calls them “guardians of the watershed.”

Citizen Scientists: Keep exploring. Keep sharing.

Maybe your discovery will become an iNaturalist Observation of the Week!

By Matthew Monte

Hey, iNaturalists! See something that blows your mind? Click ‘Add to favorites’ so it can be considered for the Observation of the Week!