I’ve had random students thanking me for my IDs on their stuff on iNat as we pass each other in the hallway on the way to our classes… 
10 Likes
Not in the wild per say, but still coincidentally.
It was my first year of college at UT Austin (aka last year), and I had recently joined the EEB (Ecology, Evolution and Behavior) club there, which in a nutshell is full of nerdy nature/ecology people like me. I became quite active on their Discord server.
On Tuesday, the second day of classes, someone asked “what did y’all do to learn more when you were first getting into botany/plant bio” and naturally I responded ranting about the virtues of applying knowledge in the field, iNaturalist, etc. A short while later, someone on the server DM’d me asking “are you Arnan the Scout?” I was taken completely by surprise.
Funny enough, this happened to be an iNat user who followed my account, though I was practically unaware of them at the time. They recognized the way I spoke online and noticed that my name was the same as my iNat username. Long story short, we met up in person the next day, and are now good friends who occasionally do botanizing together.
We both use iNaturalist and enjoy the native flora (Though unlike her, I’ve stubbornly stuck to plants and haven’t branched out… yet). We’re also both freshman undergrads. It’s been a real blessing to know in-person someone else around my age who is interested in plants… there are very few botany-leaning undergrads at UT.
9 Likes
I may have been one of those folks. :) Was nice to meet you.
4 Likes
I’ve never seen an iNatter in-person excluding friends that I’ve gotten to use it, but I sometimes find iNatters on YouTube. Some have their own channels and I find some in the comment sections on nature videos.
2 Likes
I had a near-miss once, where I realised later that another iNatter and I had been within about 20m of each other in the woods at night without noticing! They later invited me to go look at some rare longhorn beetles on a dying tree on their property.
I had a more awkward encounter in the other direction — one nice day during a CNC, I was out photographing stuff and saw a group of people doing the same thing, all with cameras and/or binoculars. I asked them if they were there for the CNC, and they had no idea what I was talking about!
5 Likes
I’d be keen to get to know some of the insect-chasers in our area (ABQ/mid-Rio Grande/Sandias/Petroglyph). So would anybody be interested in gathering for a field day, a hike, or a mothing event?
1 Like
I have seen several Inatters on youtube such as https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC-jLOblhSyOyshQ1OwDCtWQ
1 Like
I’ve never run into any other iNatters that I’m aware of, but I mostly iNat from my own yard. There are a couple of active folks in my area though that I’ve thought it would be cool to grab a lunch or maybe crack open a beer with.
1 Like
The president of my local nature club holds a Moth Ball every summer, with various moth light set-ups, baits, refreshing beverages, and so on. (It’s July 22nd this year, for those of you within range of Athol, MA, USA.) Of course, we’re all milling around trying to take photos of the moths and other insects before they take off, but once in a while I remember to be properly socialized and actually chat with another person. I’ve met several iNatters that way.
7 Likes
I recognise your name — from way down South, and across the pond!
Your grey squirrels are here too 
8 Likes
I remember meeting some people at Sam Jaffe’s “moth night” events that stopped a few years ago. Given how close our states are, I am surprised the CT and Mass people haven’t cross-pollinated more at our respective EntSoc events (I am president of CT EntSoc). We usually have a CT EntSoc moth night in May as our field outing for the spring. I know a lot of moth people on iNat only but it would be great to meet some of these people!
2 Likes
Another iNater woman walked to me one day, we both were birdwatching, but going in different directions.
Oh, once I photographed a female scoter, somebody else also did, and then I saw that another user posted photos of it!
And once I was watching gulls, met 2 famous birders, on their car we visited a park and found an owl and a beaver, but I had an awful back pain, so I’m sure they saw me as not prepared to go out of my house, lol, cause I just couldn’t stand in the end of the day, literally.
5 Likes
I’d be interested in watching that. Do you have any links to their channels? I’ve been finding the youtube algorithm has been pulling me away from my interests lately, so I need some other youtubers to follow and hopefully get things back in the right direction
1 Like
I have not met a fellow iNatter in the wild. Lots of people in Delaware cover the same territory as I do, but it doesn’t seem to be at the same time. Admittedly, I’m a little reserved, so I don’t necessarily ask people what they are doing. I haven’t seen any of the iNat t-shirts or hats–I would ask in that case. In Bradford County, Pennsylvania, there are only a handful of of people using iNat, and there’s a lot of open territory, so I suppose there’s less chance of meeting an iNatter. But, I think it would be fun to meet people, so maybe someday?
3 Likes
I add that I never use my own photo or name on here because students LOVE to track down teachers–makes it harder to run into real iNatters. :)
2 Likes
I’ll add more here if I find any, but a couple I’ve found are:
Native Fish Aquarium Channel
(nebraska_fish)
Australasian Fishes
(Australasian fishes, not a user but a project)
And a shameless plug:
RI Naturalist
My own channel.
3 Likes
Gave all 4 a follow :)
1 Like
I just had a bunch of semi-random encounters with fellow academic iNatters over the past few days at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists. (Semi-random because some of those folks read my name on a poster and set out to find me. Several people pointed at my name tag and commented on having had their IDs corrected by me on iNat. )
This conference has a lot of students presenting their first forays into science, including many undergraduate research projects. Several student projects used citizen science (specifically iNat) to gather data on a group of organisms of interest in a location of interest. Some researchers pointed out the benefits of expanding the limited dataset they could collect themselves with additional data from iNaturalist. Several ecologically-minded speakers pointed out the opportunities offered by mining iNat data for species interactions and habitat information. The conference also has a whole section of posters and talks on the scholarship of teaching and learning. So iNat was well represented throughout both research and teaching as either a tool or subject of study.
Due to how sessions at big conference often run parallel, I could not go to every single talk involving iNat, but some of the highlights I’ve attended:
One talk was looking at Joro spider postings on iNaturalist and not just looking at when and where spiders had been sighted, but also by whom. They came up with a weighed score for “user experience” on iNaturalist (based on how long the user has been using the website, how much they post, how many identifications they have etc.) They found that there are a lot of new users who create an account just to post a picture of a Joro spider, and that those spiders are much more frequently observed by new users than any other spider in the southeastern US. The more experienced users had a much wider variety of spider observations. I thought that was an interesting way to look at iNaturalist data to learn something about its users in addition to whatever the organism of interest is.
Another talk was about iNat use in the classroom, specifically a field project where students did some water sampling and identifying of critters found in their buckets. They were tasked with keying specimens out the traditional way and taking pictures to post on iNaturalist, and then comparing the iNat CV results with the keyed out field IDs. The variable studied in this case was image quality: Student photos were scored on a quality scale from 1 (blurry, far away) to 3 (in focus, close-up picture) to relate CV accuracy to image quality. The result was that CV was mostly correct on photos with an average of a 2.5 quality score, but often failed miserably on lower quality photos. Somewhat expected but I thought this was a brilliant use of a class project to bring that point to the students’ attention by having them figure it out based on their own photos generated as part of the class activity.
Another thing I’ve learned is that not every academic iNat user knows all the intricacies of how iNat works. I’ve witnessed someone who used iNat for research giving a wrong answer to how observations on iNat achieve Research Grade status. It made me cringe as that’s kind of important to understand if you’re using the data for a research project but I didn’t want to embarrass the speaker by correcting them in public. Takeaway I guess from that is that not everyone reads the documentation (aka help pages) and this includes both teachers as well as researchers using iNat.
13 Likes
I volunteer to survey threatened and endangered orchids in my State. At one such survey a few years ago, we stood in a circle and introduced ourselves. One of the surveyors said something that clicked in my memory. I said, “Hey, are you “username” on iNat?” (we had been IDing each others obs for quite some time). He replied “Yes!” After some laughter, we all re-introduced ourselves with our iNat ‘handles’. I heard a few more familiar screen names. It felt a little like we were revealing our secret identities. 
13 Likes
Not sure if this is birds of a feather or coming out of the woodwork, but attending a field trip or botany/bioblitz hosted by a regional naturalism organization often ends up with discovering other iNatters amongst the attendees.
For example, I attended a field trip by OC CNPS and some of us were chit-chatting after. Someone asked me if I was on iNat and I told them my username. When they said theirs, I recognized them from a few of their observations. Not exactly running into a fellow iNatter on a trail, but close, maybe?
I’ve also had the opposite where I saw someone with a nice camera taking nature photos. I thought they were taking photos of shelf fungus, so I asked if they were going to upload them to iNat. A bit awkward after that…
4 Likes