Diario del proyecto The iNat Blog Wayback Machine

iNat user nanorca13 took this amazing photo of a merlin harassing a bald eagle in Canada and it’s our Observation of the Week!

Sorry for the holiday-induced delay, folks, but Observation of the Week is back for 2019!

Although he’s always been interested in nature, “from spending summers on the farm in southern Saskatchewan when I was a kid with the pronghorn and coyotes to trips to the beach here on Vancouver Island,” Warren Cronan says “I literally got into my obsession about six years ago when I injured myself running trails up the mountain. So because I couldn't run I grabbed my little camera and started hiking and taking pictures.”

As his interest in photography grew, Warren upgraded his gear and began posting his photos to iNaturalist in 2015.

Birding has become my main focus of interest and the merlin observation and pictures with the eagle happened while I was looking off the back deck of my parents’ house. This was not the first time I've seen a merlin chasing an eagle here in the middle of Nanaimo...I believe the eagle got too close to the the trees where the merlins had a nest and were spending the summer. I kept taking pictures of the eagle until the merlins finally chased him off...I got some great pictures of the eagle and a few with a merlin in the pic with him. I'm glad others have enjoyed it.

A type of falcon, the merlin is a small - wingspan about 50–73 cm (20–29 in) - but quick and aggressive bird that often hunts other birds on the wing and is known for fiercely defending its territory from other raptors. Pete Dunne, in his Hawks in Flight (with David Sibley and Clay Sutton), writes “An observer may use this aggressive tendency for identification purposes and as a means of detection. High-flying merlins often betray themselves and distinguish themselves because they are vigorously harassing another raptor (even ones as large as the Golden Eagle).” Merlins are found throughout both Eurasia and North America.

“I almost always have my camera handy and ready no matter where I am,” says Warren (above, with said camera), “and my ability to track birds in flight has improved considerably over the last few years.” He uses iNaturalist as a place to organize and share his observations, as well as get ID help from other users, but says “as much as I get out of posting my observations and following others, it is being out in nature observing that I live for, and capturing an interesting shot is just icing on the cake.”

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes were lightly edited for clarity.

- Here’s some great footage of a merlin hunting and feeding its chicks.

- And this osprey nest cam video of an attacking bald eagle shows you exactly why birds don’t want bald eagles around their young.

- Falcons and eagles may look and behave similarly, but they are only distantly related if you delve into their genes. Falcons are in fact much more closely related to parrots.

This “yawning” bamboo viper, seen in India by prasannaparab, is our Observation of the Week!

“When I was in high school I used to collect nature and wildlife related newspaper cuttings, and also got hold of a few old National Geographic magazines, which helped in developing my interest on this subject,” says Prasanna Parab. “At that time, going into the wild or nature watching was just an unknown domain at home.”

He says that mentors like Paresh Porob (Range Forest Officer, Goa (India)) and Shambhu M V (Indian Forest Service) “sensitized me about nature, provided me the opportunity and inculcated the essential discipline and patience required for documenting natural history, this presented a plethora of opportunities for me to travel in the wild.” Prassana began photographing butterflies - his photo of which have been used for the management plan of the Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary, where he has been named an Honorary Wildlife Warden - but is now also taking photos of birds, arachnids, orchids, and more.

Prasanna encountered the above snake back in 2014 while visiting Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary with Honorable Wildlife Warden Benhail Antao and Louise Remedios E Antao and tells me

we sighted this bamboo viper perched on a stick near a stream in an evergreen forest. Since none of us had a macro lens, we patiently watched this for 5-10 minutes, flickering its tongue with very slow movement. Suddenly, I saw it slowly opening its mouth, I was far away owing to the fact that I had a Canon 100-400mm tele lens; I quickly managed to snap 6 sequential images of this yawning behavior.

While the viper might appear to be baring its fangs in preparation to bite or at least scare off a threat, that’s likely not the case. I consulted with NHMLA herpetologist Dr. Greg Pauly (@gregpauly) and he was sent me an explanatory list of four probable reasons a snake might mouth gape (aka yawn):

1) Stretching fangs and jaws after eating a large meal. This is basically just getting everything back into a comfortable position. Owners of pet snakes will be quite familiar with this. Sometimes people think this is because they need to reposition their jaws after "unhinging" them, but of course snakes don't unhinge their jaws. That's just a common misconception.

2) Stretching fangs and jaw musculature in preparation for eating a large meal.

3) Drawing in chemicals that can contact the vomeronasal organ.

4) In some species, a wide open mouth is used as a threat/warning display. This is common in cottonmouths and parrot snakes.

5) There are certainly other reasons still awaiting to be discovered. Owners of pet snakes will have witnessed their snakes yawn in situations that don't fit into the above categories. For example, I think snakes sometimes yawn just to stretch critically important muscles and joints that don't get much day-to-day use otherwise. But nobody has really demonstrated this.   

Dr. Pauly believes this bamboo viper is likely opening its mouth for reason number 3 or possibly 5, and is not aware of this species using it as a threat display.

This species of viper is found in southern India, often among bamboo, and is known to prey on birds, lizards, and other small animals. It should not be confused with other members of its genus, some of which are also commonly called bamboo vipers. Like all vipers this species has front fangs (shown wonderfully in Prasanna’s photo) which can fold back when not in use, and its venom is hemotoxic, meaning it damages and disrupts the circulatory system. Members of the other major venomous snake family, Elapidae (cobras, mambas, most sea snakes, among others), have fixed front fangs and their venom is generally neurotoxic, meaning it disrupts the nervous system.

While he has been photographing wildlife for many years, Prasanna (above) tells me me he only recently discovered iNaturalist while at “the Spider India Meet 2018 at Amba Ghat (Maharashtra, India) organized by Siddharth Kulkarni (The George Washington University, Washington DC) and Dr. Atul Vartak.” He attended a talk by Rohit George (@rohitmg) that discussed citizen science and soon started looking into iNat. He says, “I went through the website several times and noticed that a lot of knowledge is being shared and circulated which can aid science in a huge way, thus prompting me to make more keen observations and share them on iNaturalist.” He’s currently posting both his past observations (like this one) and present observations here.

- by Tony Iwane

- Nice article about Siddharth Kulkarni and Dr. Atul Vartak’s documenting of a new spider species in India. 

- Here’s a New York Times column featuring Rohit George and an amazing spider-mimicking moth he found.

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!

Our Observation of the Week is this Andeabatis chilensis moth, seen in Chile by bernardo_segura!

Last week, Frank Izaguirre (@birdizlife) messaged me, writing “Tony, check this one out. It just showed up on my feed! So beautiful, even kinda trippy, and a first for iNat,” and directing me to Bernardo Segura’s photos of the insane moth you see above. So it was chosen as Observation of the Day and got a lot of love on social media, including this great comment on Facebook: "The seventies called. They want their wings back!”

What was really cool is that not only did a user who was mostly interested in birds fall in love with this moth, but John Grehan (@johngrehan), a specialist in swift moths (aka ghost moths), of which this species is a member. John and Bernardo connected, and Bernardo will (fingers crossed) attempt to collect some specimens for John in the hopes of collaborating on an article.

“[This find] illustrates the value of iNaturalist in the way it can alert specialists about new species or new opportunities with known species,” says John. “I have an automatic link for new notifications on Hepialidae and this has contributed to at least two publications. And where new species are suspected it is possible to get in touch with the photographer to see if specimens may be obtained in the future.” He notes that this species is the only known member of its genus, and that those black tips on the gold scales (see below) are “unique to this species as far as currently known.”

So how did Bernardo come across this moth? Well, unlike many moth finds, he heard it first:

Two years ago I was in the beautiful Alerce Costero national park in the rain forests of southern Chile, taking photos of some frogs at night when I saw a big fluffy thing moving in some branches close to me. It was big as a fist and very loud in its movement so at first I thought it was some small mammal like the Colocolo opossum (Dromiciops gliroides) but when I pointed my headlamp towards it I realized that it was a huge moth moving clumsily in the branches, a moth of a species that I have only seen photos of before and was hoping to see sometime, the incredible and kind of mythological to me Andeabatis chilensis.

“Details of biology are poorly or entirely unknown for most ghost moth species,” says John. However, what we know about them is fascinating. Eggs are generally dropped on the ground and “newly hatched larvae of many (all?) species feed on dead plant detritus or fungi before transitioning to live plants.” And when consuming live plant material, many larvae remain on their own, “living in tunnels made of silk and debris or bore into soil or host plants. Most are probably root feeders.“ Adults, like the one Bernardo photographed, lack functioning mouth parts, meaning they often live for no more than a single night - so he was lucky to have found this one!

Bernardo (above), who has a masters in wildlife conservation, says he has “been passionate about nature since I can remember. Always a curious boy enjoying watching bugs and others animals mainly in the Chilean Andes, now I try to immortalize those marvelous findings through photography and to share them to everyone.” He works with a variety of organisms, “from the most understudied and unknown velvet worms to the charismatic wild cats of the Andes.

I’m just starting to use INaturalist and I believe it’s a great way in which everyone can help to improve the knowledge of  species, I’m now uploading years of finding, starting from interesting and understudied animals like Andeabatis chilensis.

- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. Many thanks to Bernardo, John, and Frank.

- Check out Bernardo’s Facebook page and Flickr gallery, as well as John’s site!

- Not only did Bernardo take some sweet photos of the moth, he also shot really nice video of it as well!

- Here’s a link to one of the papers John was involved in, which cites several iNaturalist observations.

This erythristic Green-striped Grasshopper, seen in the United States by pufferchung, is our Observation of the Day!

In the grand tradition of Observations of the Week depicting organisms the observer was not looking for, Michelle’s (@pufferchung) target species of the day was not an insect but a plant. “Since I was looking for something that grows on the ground and it's ‘small and red’, that's how I found the ‘pink grasshopper’,” she tells me.

iNat user Todd Fitzgerald (@oddfitz) saw her observation and commented “almost positive it’s a Green-Striped Grasshopper with erythrism which exaggerates the natural red pigments,” and other users such as @sambiology and @brandonwoo (the latter is iNat’s top IDer of orthopterans) concurred and Todd reached out to me and let me know what a cool find this was.

Erythrism, as Todd notes, exaggerates the red pigments of an organism, and is actually a well-known but not entirely common trait in some orthopterans, particularly katydids. This species typically has green or brown coloration (see photos here) and ranges from Canada to Costa Rica.

“Photography gives me an appreciation for the world that we live in,” says Michelle (above).  “ [And] nature photography also takes me to outdoors more. I've been to many Texas state parks, natural/nature preserves and hiking trails. I want to see and experience things we sometimes take for granted. It provides me with some wonderful memories and photos that I can share with my instagram/facebook friends.”

Michelle tells me that someone on Facebook suggested to her the iNaturalist community could help identify her finds, so she started posting her nature photos on iNat as well. “Using iNaturalist gives me hope that some of the things people find aren't as rare as we think they are, they're just hidden and could lead to more nature conservation efforts in different places that they didn't think to look.”

- by Tony Iwane.

- Think that green coloration in katydids is a dominant trait? You might have to reconsider.

- @silversea_starsong’s Amazing Aberrants project is a great collection of unusually colored organisms.

Our Observation of the Week is this Manayunkia feather duster worm, seen in Russia by septima15!

Home to over 20% (!) of all the world’s surface freshwater, Russia’s Lake Baikal is Earth’s largest freshwater lake (by volume) and home to thousands of plant and animal species, the vast majority of which are endemic to its waters and surroundings.

Olga Medvezhonkova (septima15) works at a research institute near the lake, where she hydrobiology researcher. What does that entail? “Most of the time I spend on the beaches or the shallow lake area for sampling bottom animals and then studying them under a microscope to determine the taxon and count the number” is how she describes it. “This is part of the science of hydrobiology!”

“I met the polychaetes during the processing of the sample from a depth of 4-5 m,” explains Olga, “and I decided to learn how to identify them to species, and for this I took pictures.” A wealth of biodiversity can be found in these samples, and she says “I [also] constantly find mollusks, oligochaetes, nemtodes, and others in the samples, but most of all I’m passionate about water bears (Tardigrades).” Check out some of her water bear photos here - hopefully she’ll add some more to iNat!

The worm photographed above is in the genus Manayunkia, which is a member of the Sabellidae, or feather duster worm family. These are polychaete worms, and polychaetes are commonly called “bristle worms” due the setae protruding from each segment of their bodies. Many move about freely, like this enormous Alitta brandti, but others like the feather duster worms create a tube in which they reside. Olga says that Manayunkia reach about 5-8 mm in length, and “at the front end there is a corolla of tentacles, with which they breathe. [The] worms live in tubules built from silt or sand particles. Manayunkia live on sandy and silty soils, stones, sponges [and] they feed on detritus. The fauna of polychaete of Baikal today includes only 3 species, conditionally considered to be endemic (http://irkipedia.ru/content/bespozvonochnye_baykala_polihety).” Nearly all polychaetes are marine, so these freshwater species are of definite interest.

Olga joined iNaturalist only recently but says it’s “a very useful idea for collecting information on the global distribution of species. And to me personally, it helps to identify species in the definition of which I’m not an expert...I am very, very glad that the Internet users liked the photo of the Manayunkia so much, and even more so if they became interested in the Baikal Polychaeta itself.”

- by Tony Iwane

- Amazingly, Lake Baikal has its own endemic seal species. 

- Like many tiny things, Manayunkia can have a large impact on its environment. For example, Manayunkia speciosa can harbor myxozoans that parasitize salmonid fish.  

- Here’s some video of a much larger feather duster worm. 

I came across this article in January and thought the study was a great example of how iNaturalist data can be used for research, so I reached out to researcher Michael Moore (@moore-evo-eco) about it. He was gracious enough to spend some of his time to answer my questions. Thank you Michael!

Michael Moore, a graduate biology student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, says he’s been studying blue dasher dragonflies for his research over the course of a few years, pretty much because they’re common across much of the middle of North America. Before he had even done field research with this species, Michael heard that males in the eastern part of the continent had darker wings than those on the western side. “I kind of filed that anecdote away in the back of my brain while I used the species for research in other topics,” he recalls. “But in the winter of 2016-2017, while I waited for the snow to clear so I could get back out there and do some research, I realized that the reason this dragonfly species has different wing color patterns in different parts of North America might be really interesting and worth investigating.”

Blue dashers would not be flying until the weather warmed, but Michael was chomping at the bit to get started with his research so he turned to iNat. “When I went to check the iNaturalist page for blue dashers, I could not believe how many really, really high-quality pictures there were just of this one species I happen to research,” he tells me. “I think at this point there are like 13,500 observations--so trove is definitely the right word...

Once I started looking through these pictures, I realized that the information that iNaturalist stores was literally everything I needed not just to get some preliminary data, but to decisively address where the dragonfly tended to get the color on its wings and where it did not....After seeing that pattern from the iNaturalist photos, there was no question that I was on to something. I applied for a bunch of small grants for experiments on how I would follow up on this exciting geographic pattern, and I got enough funding from the American Museum of Natural History and my department that I could do the experiments. Without the amazing collection of pictures of just this one little dragonfly on iNaturalist, I'm not sure any of the rest of this research would have been possible.

After getting range and wing coloration data from iNaturalist, Michael and his colleagues obtained male specimens and tested how wing coloration affected the dragonflies’ body temperatures; whether or not a higher body temperature translated into better flight performance; how wing coloration and weather affected a male’s ability to defend territory; and finally, whether wing coloration was reduced in hotter parts of the species’ range (using iNaturalist observations). What they found was that increased body temperature did improve flight performance - up to a point. Once the dragonfly’s body temperature was too high, flight performance was negatively impacted, thus reducing the male’s ability to defend territory and in turn mate with a female. So the reduced wing coloration in hotter areas of the blue dasher’s range does correlate with sexual selection and fitness.

“For me at least, the first big benefit of the data available from iNaturalist is the sheer volume of high-quality observations that are available for some species. It's still hard for me to get my head around,” says Michael. “While gathering natural-history observations is a key element of biological research, it would take years for a small team of researchers to collect that many observations. This can really jumpstart the process of identifying patterns and figuring out which ones are worth designing experiments to understand at a deeper level.” He does acknowledge that he lucked out with blue dashers because they are a charismatic, commonly observed species, and he also wishes that the photos were more standardized, so he says “I suspect that plants and animals that don't catch people's eye quite as much might not be as amenable to these kinds of studies. But these are small drawbacks when compared to the really amazing opportunities that platforms like iNaturalist present...

as more and more researchers start working with these great platforms, I really think we could witness an explosion of newly uncovered patterns in global biodiversity. The key then will obviously be to design careful follow-up experiments to help us understand why these patterns arise in the first place, but the possibilities that iNaturalist and eBird present as a jumping off point are remarkable…

...Because we are now accumulating this remarkable collection of time-stamped photographs of every manner of plant, animal, and fungi through iNaturalist and similar platforms, we're potentially going to have a digitized record of how each of these organisms evolve over the next few decades. We'll be able to watch evolution occurring on a grand scale. From a purely academic perspective, it's every evolutionary biologists dream.

What’s next for Michael? He has some ideas about how iNaturalist and other crowdsourced data can be used, but he’s also interested in following up on this dragonfly study. “Like many research projects, there are a lot more questions that this study raises than answers,” he says. “Did the dragonflies evolve to have reduced wing coloration in the hotter areas, or vice versa? What about areas where they don’t have much wing coloration yet the temperatures are not as hot?

“Identifying the evolutionary forces that act in addition to temperature to cause these patterns will hopefully help biologists understand how animals adapt to simultaneously balance the competing demands of multiple environmental factors,” Michael concludes. “Without that initial boost from the iNaturalist dataset, I probably never would have looked seriously at the role of temperature in the evolution of this trait, and we would have had no idea that we could use this species to examine these all of these important evolutionary ideas and concepts”

By Tony Iwane

Photos: Male blue dasher in Ohio by Dave McShaffrey (top); Male blue dasher in Arizona by Alex Lamoreaux (middle).

- This study is under embargo for a year, but an abstract can be found here. Michael’s co-authors were Cassandra Lis, Iulian Gherghel, and Ryan A. Martin.

- Check out another ongoing study that’s using iNat photos of mountain goats.

- A blue dasher photo was chosen as an iNat Observation of the Day. However, its in the jaws of a snake! Great photos. 

Our Observation of the Week is this Ghost Flower seen in Mexico by micrathene!

“My parents met taking an adult birding class and they encouraged me to be interested in the natural world,” says Arizona ornithologist David Vander Pluym. “Some of my earliest memories are of new birds (and being a grumpy 3 year old about missing a life bird).” While birds remain his primary focus, David’s grown more interested in other taxa and will even branch out into collecting spider specimens this spring. And plants? “I've only been interested in flowers for a few years (after my wife got me interested in actually looking at plants) and still know next to nothing about them.”

However, ghost flowers (Mohavea confertiflora) have quickly become one of David’s favorites and he’s even found them in the parking lot of a bar! The plant photographed above (and below), however, was seen while on a trip to Reserva de la Biosfera El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, on the way back from a trip to Puerto Penasco, Sonora “celebrating a couple of friends' birthdays as well as an excuse to look for birds, go tidepooling, and look for whatever else we might be able to iNat.”

The group, which included David’s wife Laura and fellow iNatter Ryan O'Donnell (@tsirtalis), were hiking up Cono Mayo when Ryan pointed out the flowers to Laura, “who identified them and called to me, who had walked right passed it! I looked back and noticed there was a small patch of them (I counted more than 50) near where they were looking and I quickly started photographing them. I think this one was one of the first I noticed and took a photo of.”

Native to the deserts of southwestern North America, ghost flowers do have a translucent  “ghostly” look to them, and David says “the number of plants out and the size and number of flowers on a single individual varies year to year too with local rainfall.” Interestingly, ghost flowers do not produce nectar but, according to the California Native Plant Society, are pollinated by Xeralictus bees, which also pollinate sand blazingstar flowers - a species that often grows in the same area. These bees are drawn to ghost flowers because the “flowers contain marks that resemble female Xeralictus; these marks operate as a sign stimulus to the male bee, which enters the flower and in doing so pollinates the Mohavea.”

David (above, in Álamos, Sonora with another non-bird organism) tells me that while he has used iNaturalist to quickly identify plants when he’s birding, he really iNats “as a way to learn more about other forms of life beyond my main focus. Being able to share sightings and have an identification made on some random organism I photographed has made me want to pay a lot more attention to other organisms I probably would have previously passed by. Being able to identify and put a name on something is a powerful thing.”

- by Tony Iwane

- Micrathene is a genus of owls which contains but one species, the elf owl, a bird that David has studied.

- It’s shaping up to be a good flower year in the deserts of southwestern North America. If you go, please tread lightly!

Our (Bonus!) Observation of the Week is this large Thaumastus thompsoni snail, seen in Ecuador by souhjiro!

Edgar Segovia (@souhjiro) is a biologist who has a lot of interests, “mainly entomology, arachnology, carcinology and malacology, and I am also interested in aquatic biology and ecology.” His curiosity with nature started at an early age, when“[I] saw as child the insects on the garden or on my school patio, and the tadpoles on the puddles around my natal city of Cuenca...and compared them with the Atlas of the Animal World, from Reader´s Digest, which was my first and favorite book.” Even at at that young age, Edgar noticed detail such as the local frogs, mainly of the genus Gastrotheca, did not lay eggs like those he saw in the book.

As he grew older, Edgar was mentored by biologist Gustavo Morejon, who lent him books and showed him Universidad del Azuay’s insect collection. “As a 12-something year old boy, [I] was totally fascinated with that, and that furthered my interest on following a biology career,” he says. “I worked in ecological assessments with land insects, and also limnology studies in different places of my country, knowing meanwhile a lot of terrestrial and aquatic insects and macrofauna (including fish and herps) from Ecuador. Lately, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Charles Darwin Station, and could be in contact with the insects of Galapagos Islands in the flesh (or carapace).”

Edgar saw the snail pictured above (which, he notes, has a shell about 8 cm in length) not recently but actually way back in 2004, while instructing rangers at Sangay National Park. Tasked with teaching collection techniques for herpetofauna and invertebrates, including pitfall traps, he recalls

One drizzly morning, revising the pitfalls, among the Chusquea bamboo surrounding one of the traps, a big snail appeared. [Everyone] there was very excited, and we put it on a tree trunk to photograph it. For a time, we forgot about the pitfalls (then remembered and continued). The snail received a lot of flashes while all those with cameras photographed it, and I used the opportunity to talk about our very much neglected terrestrial malacofauna to the rangers.

This was not his first time encountering Thaumastus thompsoni. In fact, in 2002 he assisted Brazilian scientist Meire Pena when she was collecting specimens in the Azuay province. This species, says Edgar, “is associated with Chusquea and mixed chaparro forest patches on Andean Cañar and Azuay, and currently is under threat of habitat destruction for cattle farming, pasture opening, and fast urbanization, but that threat is not yet assessed properly. Great thrushes eat the snails, and sometimes near rock outcroppings their emptied and broken shells are found.” When he recently passed through this area, Edgar noted that the forest had regained some territory since 2004, and shells on the ground indicated that thes snails still inhabit the area.

As for iNaturalist, Edgar (above, in Plaza Sur, Galapagos), heard about it from Gustavo Morejon, his old mentor, and he says

the [iNaturalist community] accelerates the process of ID, and there are some specialists and experts on there...it motivates me to publish more observations on the web instead to keep them archived, and is even fun to stroll a walk taking pics of every interesting critter or plant in the path.

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

Our Observation of the Week is this Cribraria cancellata slime mold, seen in Australia by sarahlloyd!

If you’ve uploaded a slime mold observation to iNaturalist recently, there’s a good chance that Sarah Lloyd has identified it. She’s our top slime mold identifier, with over 1,500 IDs added, and she only joined in November of 2018. But Sarah’s interest in slime molds (or “moulds” depending on where you learned English) is relatively recent, beginning in 2010. “After beginning a routine of daily morning walks I started to notice and photograph plasmodia (the second feeding stage of a slime mould) or their exquisitely miniscule spore-bearing fruiting bodies,” she says, “[And] I was hooked! By September that year I was closely examining logs and stumps with a hand lens and strong headlamp, essential equipment for seeing the fruiting bodies in the darkness of the shady forest—and I started to accumulate reference books.” She soon began to collect them as well.

Slime molds (Myxomycetes), as Sarah notes, “have mystified naturalists for centuries.” Originally classified as plants by Linnaeus, they were moved to fungi, then to animals, and

there is now general agreement that myxomycetes are Amoebozoans but whether this is a supergroup or kingdom is a matter of debate...Their predatory amoebae live in soils rich in organic matter where they feed on bacteria and single-celled fungi such as yeasts. Thus, they play important ecological roles including enhancing soil fertility through nutrient recycling….[and] despite being found wherever there is organic material, they are believed to be the least studied of all the microorganisms.

Amoeba-like when separate, individual cells will join together to form a plasmodium and eventually form rigid spore-bearing structures called a sporangia, which is what you see photographed above. Sarah notes that “slime mould fruiting bodies are never fleshy, but are essentially a mass of spores. They (and substrate) dry within hours and retain indefinitely all features needed to describe them.”

Sarah observed the Cribaria cancellata sporangia “on a log of a severely decayed silver banksia...part of a very extensive group of thousands of sporangia that covered 40 x 10 cm (16 x 4 inches).” She says they were about 1.5 mm in height and

[the species’] colour and distinctive ribs makes it one of the few species of slime moulds that can be identified in the field with the aid of a 10x hand lens. Unusually for a slime mould, the species appears in the same location each year and has stained the decaying wood a deep maroon colour.

I enjoy interacting with people and identifying their slime moulds photos on iNat. People are often intrigued to find out more about them – and to find more slime moulds to photograph. Through people’s posts I can learn about species that occur in other regions of the world and see photos of myxomycetes I’ll never see in Tasmania. As an avid naturalist passionate about documenting Tasmania’s biodiversity, it’s fantastic to be able to contribute (via iNat) to biodiversity monitoring projects elsewhere in the world from the middle of a forest in Tasmania.

I have recently started to upload my own observations of slime moulds and many other species, something that should keep me well occupied for many years to come.

- by Tony Iwane.

- Check out Sarah’s Tasmanian Myxomycetes site, as well as her Instagram account!

- And her book, Where the slime mould creeps!

- Slime mold time lapse!