Three years ago, I uploaded a single, fuzzy photo of a tiny… ant? wasp? I could not be sure so I left it at Narrow-waisted Wasps, Ants, and Bees. A year later a top identifier agreed with me. The years passed. Then two days ago, out of nowhere, an Identifier whose profile charmingly says they are “…

I’m glad you didn’t let that bad comment drive you away!

Now and then an id will come in, but it’s slow going. I still have hundreds that have never gotten a comment of any kind.

Yup! That is why I titled it Patience payoffs. :wink: I definitely benefit from watching at length, observing how things move and interact with each other. It helps me to associate and sort them and fix them in my mind. (It also is helpful because I live in a part of the world where Identifications…

The funny thing is, the butterfly photos I took while waiting for the tide to go out were not only identified, but some were even called “interesting,” and were used as illustrations in a butterfly website. Meanwhile, the mollusks remain in limbo.

Yes. Many more people like butterflies than molluscs. Molluscs are probably almost as slow as most plants.

Kind of unfortunate, since mollusks are all really cool animals.

One of my favourite things when IDing is to sort by ‘random’. Often observations that are years old come up that were just missed, they’re not even too tough for me to ID to genus or species. Sometimes, the person has given up on iNat by then. Other times, they’re like Wow! Thank you for seeing this…

Just got an id confirmed! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/161126944#activity_identification_29ebfea3-4921-4be9-8417-e75db8b09689

when I joined iNat over five years ago, I was one of the earliest to post records of the invasive Euphorbia maculata in Israel. I spent some time in herbaria to work on more sect. Anisophyllum and was dismayed that they only had one record of E. maculata - from (IIRC) 2012! I decided to check all t…

Patience payoffs

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Waiting for ID`s General	50	1538	October 25, 2025
Do older unidentified observations get buried and less likely to get attention? General	43	1342	December 25, 2024
Patience is a virtue General	44	1490	February 3, 2021
Observations that take a long time to reach Research Status General	48	1305	January 8, 2026
What if nobody IDs your observation? General question	36	5466	June 27, 2020

Patience payoffs

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