What do researchers want?

[dankillam]

I study giant clams and many people had been uploading pictures of a species on the West Coast of Africa that looked a lot like the species I study in the Red Sea, Tridacna squamosina. I knew it was unlikely to be T. squamosina, but such anecdotal reports led another team of researchers to travel there for genetic samples, where they figured out that it was an undescribed cryptic species, Tridacna elongatissima. An inaturalist curator just relabeled all those observations under the new name, giving researchers like me a better understanding of their range and habitat. So I would suggest uploading anything you find and trusting that the community of this site will work together to figure out the details. Like all of science, it is very difficult to know the value of data ahead of time. It is often only after the fact that we realize how important some observations were to the development of the field! So just upload whatever you have, no matter how innocuous!