Interesting link - on iNaturalist, two banana slugs have escaped the west coast
This is one of the "interesting link" posts I made on Cohost over a year ago. For more information about that, check out this blog post.
One of the reasons I wanted to post this is that I made a website recently for Weird Web October that uses the iNaturalist API! Check it out here!
on iNaturalist, two banana slugs have escaped the west coast
iNaturalist is a site for citizens to submit photos of wild animals/insects/ plants for identification and tracking. If photos are confirmed by enough users, they become "research grade" and can be used by scientists.
This link on iNaturalist has a tab that shows a map of all sighted banana slugs. They are all on the west coast of North America except for two, one in Virginia and the other in upstate New York. These are the only two research grade photos of banana slugs outside the west coast, and each is thousands of miles from its natural habitat.
If you view the individual rogue slug observations, here and here, you can also see folks idly discussing how on earth these banana slugs even got to the east coast. Without more information, however, their curiosity will never be satisfied. These slugs just got out here somehow; we'll never know their stories.
Elsewhere on iNaturalist, folks are much more aggro about classifying and verifying out-of-range identifications. Earlier this year I was very interested in looking at the spread of spotted lanternflies in the United States. This is an invasive species which is actively spreading throughout NY and PA. This summer saw a rash of news stories about the lanternfly, as well as communications from state agencies urging citizens to kill the flies wherever they see them.
The spotted lanternfly is not known to bite humans. You can kill spotted lanternflies mechanically, by swatting or crushing them. However, when you threaten them, they are able to quickly jump far away from you, so mechanical control is not easy to achieve.
The spread of these creatures is so tense and concerning that folks on iNaturalist became very testy about confirming lanternflies found very far away from the mid-Atlantic, specifically if they were found inside food packaging or were otherwise very clearly carried there by humans. This observation contains a fascinating argument between different scientists about whether a lanternfly should be marked as "wild" or "captive" if it got to Utah in a produce bag.
I find this site extremely entertaining! It has a mobile app that anyone can use to submit pictures of wild plants and animals, including of things you have no idea how to identify. If you go on the site, you can also view live feeds of animal sightings across the world. For example, here's a search I made for all the wild African Lions in the system. There aren't many. But if you search for every house sparrow on the planet, you start to see multiple an hour. Some of them need identification!
It's a cool site. I recommend checking it out!