I’ve been using “lynkos” as a pseudonym in internet and elsewhere for almost 20 years now. Even I’m not sure what it actually means… something to do with the lynx as a solitary lover of wild spaces with the connotations of clear sightedness, something to do with “lux”, the light I “paint” my photos with, something to do with “link” as in the internet, together with my sense of “mission” to act as an interface between nature and people. It came to me quite literally in a dream while I was setting up my first internet presence and wondering how I should call myself. It somehow felt right and it’s stuck, although perhaps now I would prefer just to use my real name to make my presence more personal.
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It is my old nickname which I use everywhere since 2002. Some celtic-like name I created for one LARP, and now obviously became large part of me.
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My name is Cooper and I was encouraged to use iNaturalist by my supervisor at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
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Still hoping that iNat will one day let me change
dianastuder
to
DianaStuder
for my iNat user name. (Have capitalised for the Forum, tx)
With all the world’s languages here, it is hard to know where to split a string of letters to break it into names.
Trying to @mention cryptic and secure names is fun. Not.
(I began blogging as Elephant’s Eye. That apostrophe was a broken nightmare. Then bloggers asked me to use ‘a name’ so Diana of Elephant’s Eye. Then Google Plus tricked us into using our face and name for Authorship. And now - J’y suis j’y reste)
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I use Enallagma9 elsewhere on the internet as a username, but here I use my real name because, well, this is my real life. You’d have to ask my parents (both dead now, alas) why they named me Lynn Harper.
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I think it should be very obvious.
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My username started as a very bad pun. One day during English class, my best friend and I, both very bored, decided our time would be better spent drawing stuff on our worksheets.
We were both interested in geometry and art and to combine the two liked to draw polyhedrons, especially the Platonic Solids.
During that time a very popular “joke” was making a bunch of obnoxious “logical” connections to turn literally anything into proof of the Illuminati existing.
Obviously therefore the only right thing to do was to draw an eye into any triangle. So we did that.
Eye + Ikosaeder (German for Icosahedron) → Eyekosaeder
I don’t know why we didn’t go with Eyecosahedron as that would have been the better pun, but oh well…
I have used Eyekosaeder as a username ever since. My best friend uses the same but with a c instead of the k.
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It’s fun to say. And a cutie.
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It’s the Valencian (Catalan) name of a hill in Valencia region (Spain), https://en.mapy.cz/s/delecapofu. I spent one memorable summer in that area and have used the name as my Internet nickname ever since. It has an exotic feel to it and it’s an original/unique word not used anywhere for anything else.
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I’ve always liked that genus name since I heard a Texas biologist pronounce it BOO-duh-LOO-uh with a nice slow drawl. Which is how I’ve said it ever since.
BOO-duh-LOO-uh cur-TIP-en-DOO-lah
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My username came from my very first username on AOL/AIM. I chose vermfly as a shortened version of Vermilion Flycatcher which was the bird that got me into birding. It is also my username on most platforms including Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, and many more. Unfortunately it was not available on eBird (so frustrating).
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Other usernames I typed in were already taken so I just put plantman, since I like plants (then I saw “plantman” was taken so I put a “4” on the end)
I kind of wish I chose a more unique username now— There are many other “plantman” accounts with various numbers attached 
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When I was in high school in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, chat rooms were just becoming a thing and I needed to come up with a username. I thought I was being really clever with GalXE, pronounced “galaxy,” and have used it ever since for apps where I want to remain anonymous. I don’t really know where galaxy came from. I’m not particularly interested in space. I think it was just kind of the thing to do at the time to spell words differently like that and that’s what I came up with. LOL
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Mine was either entirely auto generated by inat, or else I tried to use my name and inat appended a number to it against my will 
Then years later when I went to an inat meetup and people asked who I am, I said “Elias with some number I don’t remember” and several people said “oh, elias105, seen your observations”. Since then I kinda like the number, it has no significance, but apparently it’s part of my inat identity.
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My parents gave me my lifetime username.
Added: one reason I didn’t use a pseudonym is I didn’t ever want to be tempted to be more obnoxious in commenting by obscuring my identity.
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Oksana is the name of my favorite (now deceased 
) chicken and etal is like when you see names like Smith et al. on scientific papers and the like, so Oksana et al.
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“et al” means “and others” and is usually used in in-text citations. For example, if a source has 3 or more authors, you would only put 1 of the author’s name and add et al to the end. So instead of:
(Smith, John, & Gerald 2024)
You would type:
(Smith et al 2024)
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Except in this example you’d need one or more of Gerald’s muskrat friends to have coauthored also to warrant the et al.
Oh I see, John is another person from Smith.
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My username is kind of boring, just my first and middle initials with my last name.
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That is a damn good reason. I’d add that it takes some courage to use a real name given internet mob culture.
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