I’ve been keeping up with Taxodiomyia, but otherwise not doing a whole lot of IDs lately. I’ve been focusing on getting things uploaded, mostly from my moth night on August 22. I’m currently picking tiny things out from the background of my photos of larger moths and beetles.
I went to Palestine and Israel yesterday and did quite a bit of spider IDs… not done yet, but the Araneae-level needs ID pile is a lot smaller now 
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It’s taken about 8 weeks from when we hit 200 million Verifiable observations to add 10 million more. I’m going to guess we’ll hit 300 million around the middle of June of 2025 and that about 185 million of those will be Needs ID. Anyone else want to join me to guessing our 300 million mark?
Edited to add: Whoops, I flipped the percentages of Needs ID vs. Research Grade. I should have said about 115 million will be Needs ID.
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Tomorrow’s IdentiFriday we can start on the Great Southern Bioblitz (Please remember to look out for placeholder text - in the observation field if there is already an ID)
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2024-umbrella
I would love to help, but I know very little about southern species. Can you suggest a few distinctive and common plants - weeds, even - that I could learn and help out with?
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How about oleander (Nerium oleander) and castor bean (Ricinus communis). Those are distinctive-looking, monotypic (only species in each genus), and very commonly invasive and/or cultivated.
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Good ideas! I’ve actually seen both of those, too.
There will be the commonorgarden because there are always cultivated plants. Whup thru, anything you recognise, daisy, rose, pine or palm, lavender … Also dog, cat, people. And vice versa, the garden exotics where they are At Home. Everything out of Needs ID means less to plod thru.
See the most observed in 2023 starting with honey bees.
Or you can use project, location and taxon to your choice.
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Will all the GSB observations show up in that umbrella project?
Yes they should (last year there were a couple that somehow missed the cutoff for registering - but effectively - yes)
We are not big enough to split in two as CNC did this year.
Thanks. There weren’t many Needs ID observations so far – that’s why I asked.
We start at midnight. Local time.
New Zealand has rolled out the first hundred. Our moth-ers must wait another 4 hours. But once Australia joins in the numbers will jump.
Garden snail, Californian poppy, ribwort plantain and this NZ peripatus 
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For bored North American invertebrate folks, this is my new mission: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?order_by=random&place_id=6793&taxon_id=47120&lrank=suborder&d2=2019-12-31
Arthropods of Mexico at sub-order or higher from before 2020. About 30,000 unreviewed on my end after skipping most of the stick insects and mantids.
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The IDing is happening intensely now. We’ve been asked to start with the Unknowns:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&verifiable=true&project_id=189379
With the instruction to leave plants alone unless we can ID them to family or better.
See this journal post for more info on IDing the GSB:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2024-umbrella/journal/99327
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GSB is more fun when there is a new location bubbling towards the top.
Pondoland.
1900 species against ‘the winner’ Melbourne with 2300
I see busy identifiers with @Vireya at #6 (today I will focus there, my 13 IDs is 
Only 8% of Pondoland obs are RG, with about 3K still Unknown.
2022 419 species
2023 876 species
But any slice of GSB will be glad to see you.
I’ve only done so many there because I’ve been looking at Unknowns, and they have a lot. To make it interesting for myself, I’ve been looking at Unknowns for the whole GSB, sorted by Random. So I’m jumping from South Africa to Bolivia to Australia to Mozambique to …
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So many White Baneberry observations needing IDs in eastern North America. And I haven barely looked at Red Baneberry. I figured I’d do 200 identifications today before going off to do something else and I’m already past 200.
I did do some Unknowns for the GSB yesterday, but managed to ID a fungus as a fern (what was I thinking??), so I think I had best stay away - sorry! And I got an email today announcing orientation meetings for new organizers for the 2025 City Nature Challenge; the year has just flown by.
I’ll just keep plugging along; it’s all any of us can do.
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“Rescued” a rare fly from obscurity and found a couple more of the same species with no prior entries on iNat. A couple new moth species have also shook out of the pile.
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You do good work!
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I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who does things like that!
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