Laura Michet's Blog

I recommend looking at all the iNaturalist observations sorted by favorites

I have posted a tiny amount here before about iNaturalist, the major "citizen science" website for individuals to upload nature observations for identification and possible scientific study.

iNaturalist operates three different mobile apps now - I do not use "Seek" because it's often extraordinarily wrong and doesn't have the same emphasis on requiring you to make choices about the identifications yourself. (It is essentially "child iNaturalist".) I do currently have both iNaturalist Classic and the new iNaturalist app installed on my phone simultaneously, though. These apps require you to be involved in choosing the identification of the thing you've seen, and they allow you to upload your pictures so that other people can confirm your IDs. If you have ever thought, "damn, I wish I could identify birds" or "I wish I knew what the wildflowers on my hikes actually were", then I strongly recommend getting one or both of these apps! Classic has some UI decisions I still slightly prefer, but you are fine just getting the main one.

If you're at all interested in the site, I also recommend checking out this link specifically. This is a list of all the "research-grade" observations on the site with the most favorites. This means that these observations have been heavily viewed, sometimes heavily discussed. Most were featured by the site itself on social media, which is why so many users marked them as "favorites."

This tends to favor beautiful photographs of strange, controversial, or unusual things. Because they are all "research grade," it's a bit more satisfying to read through these IDs than the unconfirmed identifications, because for now at least, each of these mysteries has been "solved". (What it means for people to have achieved consensus on an ID is interestingly illuminated by some of the links below, however!)

You can spend hours reading down through this list and wiki-rabbitholing into the various creatures and situations they document. You can see:

If you want to see some more open-ended discussions, though, you can filter for highly-favorited observations which are explicitly NOT research-grade. That list is here. This features some crazy photos where people are still arguing about what the thing is, including:

...and on and on. If you want to see even more specific deep cuts of mysterious animals, you can filter that unidentified critter link by specific parts of the animal kingdom and see just the mammals, just the reptiles, etc. Anyway!! Have fun reading!!!

#inaturalist