Have you ever had a moment when you learned that you observed a creature that had never been observed in your area, town, country, continent, or even in the world? Share them here if you have!
Like mines:
First ever in Aurora, On, Canada.
Sadly, they died a while after.
This idea has intrigued many of us for quite some time. See this related thread and the resulting project for the “First Known Photographs of Living Specimens”:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/first-known-photographs-of-living-specimens
I have a few but it’s pretty easy if you just photograph every tiny thing in an understudied place like Australia.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=71923&user_id=tjeales&verifiable=any
I have exactly 2 iNat firsts I feel confident in: a muscid (Polietes hirticrura) that landed on my car window in Scotland (but astonishingly it didn’t fly off when I tried to grab it, hence how I got macro pics and keyed it out successfully), and a cranefly (Rhabdomastix edwardsi) I found two of while looking for freshwater fauna (I found mayfly larvae, blackworms, Asellus and such) on the shore of Loch Ard (which is also in Scotland), with one of those also having a venational abnormality (R2 had a break before the costa on the right wing, which happened to be the one on top) that left me puzzled as to what family the thing was in before I recognised it was an abnormality.
I have another, a dolichopodid (Hercostomus nigrilamellatus) from a Swansea car show, but I’m less confident in that one since my photos weren’t the best.
Then I thought I had two iNat first aphidiine wasps I IDed from their aphid mummies (Falciconus pseudoplatanus, Trioxys cirsii) but a couple days ago zekerom7 (rightfully) re-IDed them as just Aphidiini indet. (since, as I found out, multiple Trioxys species parasitise sycamore aphids and I had no way of knowing which mine were)
I found the first British site of Symphytum x ferrariense in 2010, though it wasn’t identified until 2021 or thereabouts. At the time it may have been the only known population worldwide (the French population has been extinct for over a century).
I’ve lost count of first county records. Probably about a score, spread across two counties. I think I’m still the original discoverer for all Cheshire sites of Alisma lanceolatum.
I see that your images are the default cover shots for 170 species
I believe this was (and may still be) the only record of the inflorescence on Syngonium oduberi, an aroid endemic to the Osa Peninsula and surrounding area in Costa Rica.
Mine is a Rough Sallfly, which was obliging enough to land on the car door, and stay put for photos.
I just posted another one last night, though, which—if I’m right about the ID—is an iNat first for Colorado, and first ever record for Boulder County. The problem is that it can cause all sorts of problems for the waterways that it invades, including hypoxic conditions in the water and acting as a mosquito nursery. I want to go back to that location anyway, as it’s a favorite, but now I feel as though I need to get up there ASAP to check on the condition of the site.
Water Lettuce (Pistia Stratiotes) – Wonderland Creek, Glenwood Grove, Boulder, CO, US
Here is a cool tool to figure out your FIRSTS for observations.
https://glauberramos.github.io/inat/first-observer
I have one of a scorpion - a screenshot from an old family video.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/331710362
Another of a woodlouse from southern Spain (not yet Research Grade).
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/331925096
And another of a stick insect in South Africa.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/58504745
The tool even allows you to filter by country/state/county/etc.
This is not complicated to achieve. Often it is not even anything rare, just something others did not care about too much. For me the tool says:
Karpatiosorbus rhodanthera
Rubus acanthodes
Rubus dollnensis
Rubus salisburgensis
Rubus clusii
Rubus chaerophyllus
Rubus subgothicus
Dianthus × hellwigii
Rubus capricollensis
Rubus violaceifrons
Mostly apomyctic plants that some experts showed to me when I hanged around with them. In some cases found the plant myself and either I arrived at the id myself or I let the expert to id my speciemen. For the last one I just went several locations from the paper where the species was desctibed and I observed it there.
On a bioblitz as part of CNC 2026, I was taking pictures of dozens of bees, flies, butterflies, etc., visiting a long hedge of blackberry plants that were in bloom. Just trying to get pics of them all.
With the diligence of some identifiers (I didn’t know what some of them were), one of the insects was identified as being a Blera Johnsoni, a kind of hover fly. These are only known from one pinned specimen from 1894 from Washington state, and has not been documented at all, until this one found in Northern California.
As a number of iNat folks I know often say …take the pic, cause “you never know”
I just found out that I found multiple firsts of Aurora. Such as my western yellowjackets, narrow-winged tree cricket, funnel web wolf spiders, and rustic wolf spider. So you’re right, people really miss a lot.
It’s surprising.
By the way, Ontario only has six observations of yellowjacket wasp. How funny.
For clarity, do you mean first observation on iNaturalist, or first recorded observation by anyone ever?
On the mirror side of the former, there’s first identification on iNaturalist. I seem to have just added the first iNat identification of 2 mallow species in Chile, and 3 in South Africa.
first observations on iNat in a certain area, town, country, continent, or in entire world
This is also a nice tool https://elias.pschernig.com/wildflower/leastobserved.html?user=&rg=1&cache=false
Enter any inaturalist user name to see the list of species with the least global observations observed by that user. You can also filter by project or place
My favorite story is the first time an adult male was linked to the females and juveniles in the early days of researching the Big-eyed wolf spider. The unnamed species had been recognized for years but was only documented by a dozen photos from above. I was thrilled to find a population on top of a hill in Sonora, TX since that was only a 3 hour drive compared a 7 hour drive to where the others were seen. Based on the age of the ones I saw on the first visit, I figured another 6 weeks should make them adults. I watched the weather and returned on a warm day in late November. The local 4H arthropod club joined in and we waited for dark. The kids had a great time and found all the good stuff since I was answering questions every time someone found a spider. Toward the end of the search one of them turned up one I never had seen before. When I started doing a photo set starting with the ventral view, I suddenly realized it had to be the male of the species. Armed with that knowledge I was able to find several observations of males already on INat but of course no one knew what they were.
Oh wow! Apperently I have 7 for OH!
