Hello! :) I popped in yesterday after being away for a short while and was absolutely floored by the frosted phoenix post. The rediscovery of a presumed-extinct species after 65 years surely makes this among the most legendary iNat observations. If there were an iNaturalist hall of fame, I can picture it being right at home alongside the De Winton’s Golden Mole and Columbian Weasel posts.
What are some observations you would consider hall of fame worthy?
I’ll be the one to say it, Gerald (Warning, the link may cause your device to experience extreme lag).
Gerald comes with a health warning
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unfollowed-observation-keeps-showing-up-on-home-dashboard/49804/12
I’m afraid of touching ANY link having to do with Gerald. I looked briefly at that post once and gratefully escaped unharmed!
There are a lot of first obs of a species, but my personal favorite has to be this Mangora Baii. Probably some bias there because I love Mangora and I was involved with that obs but still a very cool observation.
I’d be pretty happy if I never heard about “Gerald” ever again.
depending on what you mean, OP, I could lean toward the small-scale or bigger things. I don’t think any of mine are really all-time hall of famers, but I consider myself lucky to have seen a variety of seldom observed phytoparasitic fungi (and I encourage everyone to check their own most rarely observed species!). probably more in the spirit of the topic are the many new regional or country records of species, or the rediscoveries of certain taxa. many of the latter do make it into the featured observations though since they’re so incredible to such a variety of people, so that feed probably has a great many of the most showstopping.
Well, of the observations I’ve interacted with, this is the one that took the longest to vindicate the original observer’s ID. The observer “stuck to their guns,” as the expression goes, even in the face of going maverick, and now it has paid off: Turtle-Doves and Collared-Doves (Genus Streptopelia) from 53100 Siena, Province of Siena, Italy on May 14, 2019 at 12:56 AM by docprt · iNaturalist
Not sure if this one would count but it has a funny story along with it. While on a fieldtrip in 2012 one of our vehicles was having issues so we took it to a shop and were hanging out at a park in South Tahoe while waiting for it to be fixed. While there a small beetle landed on me, it was crawling around on my hand so I took a few pictures. I stored the pics on my computer for years not thinking anything of it. Then in 2016 I joined iNat and began going through my old fieldtrip photos. I tried for a while to ID the beetle with no luck, so I posted it at family level. A short time later it was ID as the very rare Lepine Lady Beetle (Brumoides histrio) and that my pictures were possibly the second time it had been photographed in the wild. It was the first observation of the species on iNat and took around a year and a half until someone else made another observation, and there are so far only 12 observations on the site. Goes to show that the most amazing discoveries can happen without even really knowing at the time.
Almost everything in https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/first-known-photographs-of-living-specimens is worthy, in my opinion.
I would say all observations that have 25+ favorites belong in the Inat Hall of Fame as those are typical “famous” observations and there are not many of them. Also most Observations of the Week and other rare finds that have 1 or 2 observations would go in. I would say 1 in every 50000-250000 observations belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Perhaps we could vote on it and if 75% of people voted it in it would join the Inat hall of fame, just like the Baseball Hall of Fame.
From my personal collection, I’m happy with https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/384993, taken before this single-site endemic species was described. But there are probably quite a few more observations of that sort on iNat than people realize.
Many of the observations sorted by favorite:
The funny ones tend to end up in Geralds of the World.
Don’t know about ‘hall of fame’ worthy, but this observation of the Phou Khao Khouay Roundleaf Bat, Hipposideros khaokhouayensis, is the only one on iNat and confirms that they’re found in this part of Vietnam. It got a few bat people pretty excited.
It would be cool if we had an easy way to see most-faved observations!
We do! Go to “Explore”, then click the “Filters” button, then select “Sort By” → “Faves”:
Alternatively, there’s also the link that @vreinkymov has above.
If you were going by the number of faves, then there would be people who got lots of their friends to fave their obs just to get into the hall of fame.
