I work on some obscure parasites. I have tracked down many hard to find specimens via BugGuide and INaturalist. Many of those were found by kids that just started collections and didn’t know what they had. So I would chat with the parents to find out what they were into, and found I could often trade a gift certificate to get insect collection supplies to them (they could pick out stuff they wanted) in exchange for sending the specimen. Often this has saved me a huge amount of effort (not having to fly across the country and search for days for something I may never find). I am doing dna work so really nice to have fresh samples rather than extracting broken dna from a 100 year old museum specimen. So I hope INat stays open to this kind of trading. Some kids have really got into this and have been extremely helpful, and we both learn.
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