You know you're seriously into iNat when

… when you zoom in on your personal map to the finest level that red tiles show up and wonder how you’re going to connect two cities you frequent (highlighted in green)

15 Likes

When a friend (who knows about your balcony garden and also about your slight bee obsession) sends you a cute image that includes the proclamation “Happiness is seeing a bee on a flower you planted yourself”.

And you smile and thank her … and then find yourself noticing that you have mentally qualified the statement:
“…provided it was not a honeybee”
“…and provided you had your camera with you and it remained in one place long enough for you to get identifiable photos for iNat”

18 Likes

…you find yourself searching through the brush while waiting for the others on roadtrip bathroom-stops.

…you find yourself more tolerable of being soaked with rain, freezing cold, or covered in ocean-gunk. What if I see something new?!

And one that’s more frustrating:

…you run out of free storage every two days on vacation!

I love this entry on the list. I’ve never screamed from a spider moving before until I started to creep towards them to take identifiable photos! iNat has helped me a lot with my various animal related fears.

9 Likes

Yep, done that, too, and extremely annoying, but also your own fault when you have 3,000 photos on your camera card from only a few months :laughing:

5 Likes

This is totally me! I’m in a big family, so bathroom breaks on road trips can take a while. Usually, I can get about 10-20 observations in a 20-minute bathroom stop.

6 Likes

I was in China and I was dissappointed to learn that the honeybees I photographed were western honeybees and not Asian honeybees

During my trip to China and England I was VERY glad I’d dropped the cash on a 1 TB storage card, and brought my 8 TB SSD in my luggage. Just from taking photos outside the Uber during my 19 hours in England, I got about 5000 photos (roughly 180 GB)

6 Likes

when you get absurdly excited about going to new ecoregions and physiographic provinces

8 Likes

I have a shell script which copies pictures to my computer and deletes them from the camera’s memory card until no more than 40% is used. I could share it, but the version for the sound recorder is easier to understand, as the camera makes lots of subdirectories.

1 Like

…you’ve been stalking outside at night to see how many moths, insects and mosquitoes have been attracted to your outside house lights, and forget that you’ve changed into your pajamas! This has happened to me more often than I’d like to admit, yet this is usually around 11 pm so no one else should be out!

10 Likes

… when you go to the Smokey Mtns. and you notice new species of moss outside one of the bedroom windows of the cabin you rented, so your husband volunteers to take pictures with SEEK. You return home with new moss species and he returns with ROCKY MOUNTAIN SPOTTED FEVER!

I first started to go over the handrail and up the steep slope because the cabin was built right by where they dug the land to put the cabin there. Since everyone knows I’m a klutz, he volunteered to do it for me! He’s such a gentleman and we’ve been very happily married for 40+ years and we still hold hands whenever we’re out walking! We’re that “cute old couple” you may see around! :woman_white_hair:t2::old_man:t2:

7 Likes

Or early morning!

…when you forget to pack your stuff for departing because you found an awesome mantis out of your reach! (Couldn’t get photos :smiling_face_with_tear: it was too high on the roof) but you don’t get discouraged so you find a cool moth and you move it on the apartment’s glass table to get a good shot of it.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/311845516

6 Likes

Two observations for the price of one! Only one observation of Rickettsia rickettsii so far.

4 Likes

I don’t wear pajamas; I sleep with my shirt on and my bottom naked. One morning at 3:10 I spotted a moth on the bathroom mirror (it turned out to be Pyralis farinalis), grabbed my camera, and realized I was about to take a picture of my naked groin for publication on the web. I then put my shorts on and took some pictures of both sides of the moth at once. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/304913499

10 Likes

You read all the way through serious threads like this one, even though you have never been interested in the taxon under discussion, and have no plans to become involved:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalists-earthworm-problem-and-how-to-fix-it/70743

And then you read the excellent linked guide by the author of the post, which almost tempts you to dive into the field:
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/thirty_legs/110030-photographing-earthworms-for-inaturalist

15 Likes

you binge read this entire topic instead of writing homework, before proceeding to think for some valid contribution you could add to the forum for the rest of the day, only to get nothing but a vague feeling that you need to stop getting distracted and focus on your studying, but remember that both Bird Month and the ANC are coming up and hence give up studying and spend the rest of the week Inatting…

Totally not speaking from experience.

12 Likes

YES TO ALL OF THESE… this thread made me realize that I found my people and it’s definitely not just me (and I’ve only discovered iNaturalist six months ago!)

10 Likes

Wait can you explain the “provided it was not a honeybee” part?

1 Like

Where I live, they are invasive. But they are useful, so technically I guess they’d be nonnative. But still probably not as exciting for most people as it is to see a native bee out and about :honeybee:

5 Likes

Also just realized that the title of that emoji was “honey bee” lol it looks nothing like the honey bees I know :laughing:

1 Like

In most of Europe honeybees are almost certain to be from a domestic hive. While they are native here and thus the concern about impacts on local environments is somewhat lower than in, say, the Americas, they do compete with wild bees, most of whom are much less numerous and have very specific requirements that mean they are vulnerable to habitat loss, industrial monocultures, and climate change in a way that honeybees are not.

Honeybees are of absolutely no interest to me from an iNaturalist perspective; they are ubiquitous and as a freeranging but non-wild species their presence tells us nothing important except that there is probably a beekeeper within ca. 3 km (which in a densely populated country like Germany is most places, even in nature reserves).

4 Likes