iNat in the news: Bug Hunt

General
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A friend of mine features here. I would have been able to meet up with the journalist, had I not been off on a bicycle trip looking to record mistletoes. :slightly_smiling_face:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-09/qld-bug-hunt-insects-photos-research-citizen-scientists/106171252

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Never looked a cuckoo wasp in the eye before !

(I see you also have wildfires raging - I can smell the smoke coming across False Bay from our Pearly Bay fire)

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Floods to the north, fires to the south: I never thought Brisbane would approximate a climate refuge.

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This is a really cool article !

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Great article! And is that Elle’s face reflected in the eyes of that jumping spider? (As I heard on a podcast, jumping spiders have excellent eyesight, so if it looks like they’re looking at you, they’re looking at you.)

One quote I didn’t understand.

Dr Burwell described himself as an “iNaturalist tragic”, with more than 14,000 observations logged on the platform.

Does “tragic” have some different connotation in Australia? Something like enthusiast?

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Are your family supportive of your iNatting?
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Yeah, someone with a deep interest/fascination with something

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Are your family supportive of your iNatting?
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I had no idea that it was just an Australian word usage!

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I spent a year in Australia in 2002, and I don’t recall ever hearing the word “tragic” used in this way. I asked an AI about it:

The Origins: From “Cricket Tragic” to General Enthusiast

The term didn’t start as a general word for “enthusiast.” It began specifically within the world of cricket to describe someone whose obsession with the sport—its statistics, history, and minutiae—was so all-consuming that it was viewed as slightly “tragic” or pathetic by outsiders.

1980s & 1990s: The term gained significant traction in sports journalism. It was used to describe fans who would sit in the rain for hours, or memorize obscure batting averages from the 1920s.

The John Howard Era (1996–2007): The term’s mainstream explosion is often credited to former Prime Minister John Howard. He famously and frequently described himself as a “cricket tragic.” By the time you were there in 2002, he had been in office for six years, and he used the term often, in order to humanize his image.

If you weren’t following cricket or political interviews closely in 2002, then it’s easy to see how you missed it. At that time, it was still largely a sporting label, or a political label.

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Interesting blog post from 2009 which also mentions “Beatles tragic or an opera tragic”:

https://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-being-tragic.html

So it spread from cricket (and football - as “footy tragic”) to general usage pretty quickly.

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Divided by a common language. When I lived in Switzerland I was surrounded by languages and languages. Sort of weird that my parents from New Zealand and London, and I in South Africa, and USA and and and all speak ‘English’. In Switzerland itself, there are languages, and dialects. My husband and his father from Solothurn and his mother from Berner Oberland, we lived in Aarau and I worked in Zurich. I speak ‘High German’. Had a Romantsch colleague who told me - from valley to valley they could not understand each other and communicated in Hochdeutsch.

And then a reminder that for many iNatter’s this English is a second or third language. Now you bring us Australian tragedy :rofl: