if you wanted to go to a less covered area, there is plenty of choice: a few years ago I did Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths) statistics on iNat by country. See here https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lepidoptera-butterflies-and-moths-on-inaturalist-some-statistics/7432/6 . To be honest, I would rather visit Central Asia or some African countries. They probably even have more “exotic” species to offer than North Korea (as mentioned above). A few months ago I was visiting Uzbekistan. A very good experience! And, wow! Those moths! I knew less than half of them …
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I love it there! It’s really great. It’s hard to not think about or maybe even pine over what we are missing since we can’t go to North Korea but I think South Korea is a really good and accessible substitute. Obviously not the same but I think for most things it is pretty much close enough. I found it to be very welcoming, too. I can assume North Korea would not feel similarly.
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sadly we are missing a lot. . .
anyway after mother looks over a trip advisor for a Eco tour to the Galapagos i’ll be savin for that
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though not gonna lie the South Korea trip sounds really nice like every other country there’s A LOT i need
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Wherever you go will be great and worth it. It’s easy to think about where you can’t go, but I assure you there’s much more places you can go than can’t. I hope you go to them all! Maybe I’ll see you there because I want to go everywhere, too.
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You could very feasibly end up reaching over 200,000 species before you can think of doing that. I think people don’t realize just how much there is out there in the world. For instance, iNaturalist has records of close to 100,000 species in the United States alone (and we can assume this total is still 80-90,000 even with a lot of misidentified observations).
And that’s still just the tip of the iceberg, I’m regularly finding species in the US that are “iNat firsts” or haven’t been posted before.
If you want my advice, I’d focus on areas of high diversity that are much easier to travel to, long before I’d focus on something like North Korea or other tough areas to visit.
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I think OP setting a more realistic goal than ‘all the species’ is a better idea than planning to travel to obscure places at high risk. That goal is, quite literally, preposterous.
Unless they’re just looking to go on high-risk adventure and photos is the excuse.
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Here is the somewhat funny but simple solution to travel throughout the North Korean countryside. Contact the NK embassy and request a permission for a scientific expedition to look for plants and animals that should be identified with the name of the great leader. Since according to their Juche ideology, he was born of/on the great mountain, those foothills should be requested obviously for the expedition. Just imagine looking for Accipiter Kim Jong Uni, Buto Kim Jong Uni, Ulmus Juchei, Hordeum Kim Jong Uni.
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and i’m gonna have to shut you off right there mate
its funny how you don’t seem to know that i KNOW THAT
why don’t you check your facts again and add a little logic to that
i swear this person is just making some weird head canon that this is not a goal and that i’m simply lying to everyone i meet about trying to photograph every single living species on the planet and that its not my hobby and goal and that me photographing every single species i’ve found for the past 3-4 years is just a ploy for a “high-risk adventure”
welp i guess he got me good, good on ya Headsoup!
The reason people are skeptical of your goal is that it is physically impossible to photo every species on earth - there are millions upon millions of species, many of which are undescribed.
Its wonderful you want to document as much as you can, but all everyone is saying is that there are MUCH safer places to knock out before you start trying to bring a camera to photograph stuff in, again, the most insular totalitarian regime on the planet
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Yes this, and also unless someone had spent a lifetime across most of the rest of the globe, going to North Korea doesn’t make sense for a US citizen for the stated reason of collecting observations of every species. There might be other reasons someone wants to, but for this one, it’s hard to see the logic.
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and i’m aware of the endless endeavor i KNOW how it is since i created this goal for myself
the logic was me asking a question about the place since i ORIGINALLY wanted to go there in my future but found out there are less than 500 species identified there on inat which led me to search a bit of the country which led me to ask you guys about it
pretty decent logic right there
You asked a question in a public forum, you cant be mad that people are questioning the validity of the premise
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Until this point, you gave no indication that you did know; in fact, quite the opposite.
You can’t get mad at someone for taking a hypothetical too seriously if you actively avoid presenting it as such.
To the question “is it worth the trouble of photographing species there [North Korea]” the answer seems to be resounding no.
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Respectfully, I really think if by some miracle you’re able to make it into NK, it won’t take long before you’re hit with a sobering reality: soldiers clutching fully automatic rifles will have the upper hand over a young adult armed with a camera and an “I’m a citizen of the world” mentality. You can preach human rights all you want with the enforcement arm of a hostile foreign government, and they’ll just smile and drag you off just the same. I think you were given solid advice by multiple people previously. I think we all want to see you document as many things on your list as possible, travel the world, enrich your experience as a member of humanity, then make it home safely. If you can do virtually everything you want to do all over every continent on the planet, the only stipulation being staying out of a handful of places, I think it’s an easy choice.
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also there’s ZERO indication of this whatsoever its you guys who assumed i didn’t know this very obvious conclusion
I’m sure many species occur in that large land area that are endemic there. Here where I live (Shetland Islands), despite the small area our land occupies, we have 29 endemic hawkweed species. Some 7+ are thought to be extinct unfortunately. We also have various other species of endemic flora such as the all famous Shetland Mouse-Ear. Ontop of that, we have an endemic subspecies of Starling and Wren, and various insect species.
North Korea, considering it’s many, MANY times the size of the island I inhabit, would likely have an incredibly diverse range of unique flora and fauna which we are missing out on from my viewpoint, even if it is all extremely rare and/or inconspicuous.
They’re not trolling you. No one is trolling you. They’re trying to convince you not to do an extremly foolhardy thing
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