Finally, not nearly as rare (759 obs) but I was baffled that the least-observed species of bird I’ve seen is the fiery-billed aricari-- it is a common, easy-to-spot and charismatic bird across its range. I suppose it’s just down to how limited that range is.
This tool is wonderful! According to it, my least observed taxa is this observation of a stonefly, tentatively identified to subfamily Peltoperlinae, which has only 35 records on iNat. Probably under-observed/identified rather than rare, though. If current ID is too specific to prove, family-level ID is 222 obs on iNat. I’m now interested in photographing these better, considering the rather few observations of Peltoperlidae identified to genus-level or lower.
yes, definitely not the rarest in some absolute sense… but nevertheless “rarest-on-iNaturalist”, or rarely observed/recorded to put it another way.
it’s all bound to be artefactual in some sense, and it depends on one’s definition of rarity (range-restricted but highly abundant? widespread but in very low density? necessarily both range-restricted and low-density?), of course…
I didn’t make it, credit goes to Elias Pschernig (I believe) – I don’t know enough about API use to make such a thing myself. It is a very fun tool though!
edit: to contribute mine to the topic – I’m one of the only 4 iNaturalist observers of a very scarce cottonwood endemic to the Sierra Madre Occidental, Populus guzmanantlensis. I stumbled across the population while collecting with colleagues from the IBUG at the University of Guadalajara – unbeknownst to us it was in a previously recorded population, but we were all very surprised to see it that day.
Now, I am just a layman :) but I think / I suspect, only no. 2 (the shrimp) that is probably not so common. No. 1 (the coral) and no. 3 (the nudibranch) are really a surprise (to me at least) that they make to the list at all! No 4 (the worm) (this is where I ‘score’ the highest, 40% of all obs :)), according to the expert, is rarely captured, and probably is a new species. So am very happy with this.
But all and all, there are many unidentified species among things underwater (ie not yet studied); you can see that there are so many genus and even higher taxa on underwater obs!
Wow, I loved browsing through the list created from Elias Pschernig’s tool. Thanks for sharing that, @sbrobeson! This is my list of species I’ve observed with the fewest observations on iNaturalist:
Exactly, the thread does say Rarest Finds on Inaturalist (sic)… It does not say rarest in the world. As we move on and more and more people observe there will likely continue to be first observations global and regional. Especially as more diverse people survey more diverse realms looking at more diverse species. Just for fun, spend a day not looking at your favourite species in your favourite spot and look for something different. If you normally look in field, look at the seashore or lakeshore or underwater…something different.
and some others similar 3/3 2/3 etc. Basically all cave species and fireflies. Gee wonder what I like…and I think fireflies people just assume one of few as it’s what iNat tends to suggest but there are a lot and Dr Faust (not on here) has been teaching me and helping me ID them :)
I like carabid beetles so it was really cool to discover via that tool that I apparently have an iNat-first (and so far only) observation of Carenum marginatum.
Even GBIF only has eighteen records, and none with images!
Also not rare or anything but just randomly found an exotic turtle in a new area for my region: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/154683829
-Which is an exotic species from Australia that actually doesn’t have that many observations in general either.
I’m looking at mostly invertebrates in an area which has very few iNatters and according to that search tool I have observations of 51 species which have fewer than 10 observations, and of those, I am the only contributor for 8 of them. The trouble is that this is only able to help with named and identified observations. Many obs are only identified to Family or worse and some could well be undescribed species which are much more interesting but we don’t even realise it.
