You beat me to posting this lol!
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Well, service is back. I don’t know if I could have gone 35 hours without making identifications. 
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35 hours passed quite fast LOL… but it would have been a LIFETIME without iNat 
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When you get up in the morning and find that your partner has popped a beetle in a jar that he found on the ranch sliders while you were asleep in bed so that you can put it on iNat.
Now that’s love.
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You identify a bacteria hanging out in some ethanol in the lab (scary at first! Ethanol is supposed to keep bacteria at bay!) and become the only observer of the species (Paenibacillus glucanolyticus) on iNat Took lots of PCR and gels, but so rewarding to finally figure out who was making the ethanol all cloudy.
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Ummm. Can you assure us with some reason why that’s not scary?
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“Mom, you’re trying to recruit for iNaturalist, again!”
Hell, no! I bought a camera with good zoom, so I can get photos without getting within 10 feet.
You know you’re seriously into iNat when:
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Your kids refuse to go for a walk with you unless you promise not to take any photos, but you (and they) know you won’t be able to stop yourself.
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You watch the botanist on the movie “Master and Commander”, and keep thinking … OMG, it’s ME!
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OMG, Yes!
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Sure! The lab I work in does a lot of work with soil bacteria and creating liquid soil environments, so naturally we have a lot of bags of soil in the lab. P. glucanolyticus has previously been isolated from soil, and other places like paper mills. We tried to see if it would grow in a mixture of ethanol and LB nutrient media, and no cloudiness occurred. So we concluded that while the spores probably floated from a soil bag into our ethanol and were happy to chill there, that the bacteria can’t reliably reproduce in ethanol (even when there are also nutrients in the ethanol). Our main worry at first was that it could be a Clostridium strain or a type of bacteria that could be disease-causing. In all the experiments run, a hefty amount of bleach was used to ensure that P. glucanolyticus did not thrive anywhere we did not want it to!
TLDR: only the bacterial spores were able to persist in ethanol, not the reproducing bacteria.
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You try reviewing some observations of a genus you recently learned to identify, from a country you don’t usually review. And you find one observation that’s clearly not in that genus, but you’re puzzled what it could be.
And so, you spend two hours on a Saturday night going down a rabbit hole, trying to identify this photo, hampered by not being an entomologist and not having the technical vocabulary to properly describe the features you’re seeing. That rabbit hole includes going to the Explore page and scrolling through thumbnails of all of the nearly 5,000 beetle species found in that country (spoiler warning: that list of thumbnails displayed is not complete).
In the end, you find the right species, after Google’s AI fails to name the species from your description, but succeeds in naming the family. And the species has only 19 other observations on iNaturalist! That’s a plot twist that seems more cinematic than real life, but who’d make a film about taxonomy and identifying an insect photo? 
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Now THAT’S dedication!
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You realize 95% of the pictures you take are iNat observations instead of scenery pics of places you are visiting.
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What, that’s not how everybody takes photos? 
(True story: going through my to-edit backlog the other day, I ran into several landscape shots featuring clouds and sunset, asking myself “now, why the heck did I take these?” Then I remembered that we were getting a huge amount of wildfire smoke blowing in that week; not only did it turn the sunset into this lurid, psychedelic Peter Max poster, there was an atmospheric mirage of the sun in purple. Seriously trippy.)
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…After months of taking a photo of an organism just for the pleasure of getting to 100 observations, you find yourself with a scholar of that taxa who asks you for a second photo and you return to those places for the second photo, even though you know in your heart that you will find nothing.
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I made a point of getting out to see those sunrises! Spectacular and Spooky!
Those mornings were also eerily quiet.
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When you hint that for Xmas you would like a Canon GP-E2 to add to your camera set up just so you have reliable location data being added to your photos which will making adding those iNat observations so much easier…
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When you ask your wife to hold onto your belt while you hang out from the railing of the rainforest canopy tower so that you can photograph a cool beetle you saw. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/71297036
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When you vigorously celebrate the fact that you finally have uploaded all of your photos up to the start of the current month (But are still 15 days behind)
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I’m currently still going through photos from mid september!
I’m still going through photos I took in mid-september!
Some high schoolers at Taco Bell saw my big camera and asked if I have an Instagram…I told them that I take photos of humans maybe once a month lol
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When you realize that not everybody wants to hear about how butterfly-ant relationships and the mess of taxonomy works and you sit in a corner alone wishing there were more naturalists in this world…
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