I found an oak gall with two adult wasps wandering around on it. I can't tell if they are male or female, but I don't see long ovipositors. I asked someone who suggested they may be females in the family torymidae getting ready to parasitize the larva inside the gall.

Any wasp people willing to throw in their two sense on who these little wasps are and/or what they might be doing? Thanks!

(Zoomed in photos at the end)

I often read comments in this sub in the lines of "I want to help but I am not an expert in any taxa", "I have the ID skills of a 5 year old", "I am scared of making mistakes while IDing". The reality of iNat right now is that we need you and your basic skills desperately!

Experts often filter the IDing page to only see the taxa of their expertise, yet a lot of observations are sitting as "unknown", "animal", "life", etc, and will never reach these experts if the "clean up crew" (such as myself!) don't get them into the right queues to start with.

To make things super easy, I wanted to directly link some queues where you, yes you, can make a real difference

>But what if I make a mistake?

Mistakes are ok as long as you are responsive when corrected!
If you marked some long forgotten observation as "insect" and someone else comes and marks "arachnid", first, you bought the observation to the attention of this arachnid guy! that's great! Now, if you think the other person is right, you just need to withdraw your ID or (If you realized that you can also confirm it's an arachnid now that you look better) you can change your ID for a more correct one.

Note that IDing is a much, MUCH easier and more pleasant experience on desktop. I highly recommend using a laptop/pc for this.

Things anybody can do:

(Partly curated from this great forum post)

• Identify "unknowns" in your area with this link. Moving "unknowns" to any finer level is super important. Even if you can only tell that it's a plant or a bird or a mushroom, that is already moving it where specialist can find it easier. Tips for finer and better IDs:
  • If it's an obviously decorative/cultivated plant or an obviously domestic/zoo/museum animal, mark the "captive/cultivated" checkbox
  • If it's a selfie or the focal point is obviously a person, ID as Human (It will move to Casual automatically)
  • If you kinda know what kind of thing it is, but don't know which "level" to choose, I find it easy to go to the "suggestions" tab and click on the name of a suggestion, it will open a page with the taxonomy of that suggestion. Then, pick a level that you are sure it has to be in (EG: the suggestions give you 4 different doves, click on the name of a dove species and select the Columbidae, which contains all pigeons/doves)
• Bored of your area? Travel to a place with few identifiers! Here are the "Unknowns" of some places that seriously need the help of the cleanup crew: Cochabamba, Bolivia - Madre de Dios, Perú - Trinidad-Beni, Bolivia
• Help people notice that their observations are missing a date or location checking this link (it goes to non-captive casual observations w/photos in your area). If you see something that is not a captive/cultivated organism, you simply need to add a comment (instead of/alongside an ID) to the user telling them that their observation is missing the date/location, and to please add it so it can be seen by other people and move to Research grade.
• ...While you are at it, check if you didn't forget to add a date or location to your observations! use this link and change my username at the end with your to see your casual observations. Anything that is not a captive/cultivated organism is probably missing something!: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=casual&photos=true&user_id=naelin
• Get started with annotations on your own observations! Annotations are a list of attributes in every observation and are very useful when people want to find photos/obs with certain attributes, such as checking how the larva of a certain insect or the seeds of a certain plant look like (it also helps people filter out dead animals that they may not want to see). You will not be able to add everything, but you will be able to add a lot! Use this link and change my username with yours at the end. Then use the "annotations" tab to add the annotations you can confidently tell to each obs: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=needs_id%2Ccasual%2Cresearch&verifiable=any&without_term_id=22&place_id=any&user_id=naelin
• Use the map on the "explore" page to navigate to the nearest zoo/botanical garden in your area, and select to see only that place with the square/circle/places of interest buttons. Once there, click Filters, then "identify" to go to the identify page of the park, and move to captive/cultivated any pesky zoo animals or decorative flowers you see.

There are a lot more things you can do, but let's start somewhere. You will learn a lot by doing this, especially as you will start receiving notifications when other people refine your initial IDs (If you don't want this, you can change the notification settings in your profile).

If there is interest, I can make further posts/comments with more "anybody can help" kind of tasks. I hope you find this useful!

I found this on a beach in Nevis and don’t know what it is. About 2.5 inches long.

Hey everyone. A couple weeks ago I built something I thought might fit this community, and it’s now on the App Store. Wanted to share it with the people whose work made it possible.

It’s called Wildex Daily. Small iOS app that does one thing: every day at UTC midnight, the same five wildlife species go out to every player worldwide. Photo plus four multiple-choice options each. Identify them, build your dex, keep your streak. One round per day, no retries, no leaderboards, no streak schemes, no ads, no IAP, no tracking, no accounts.

The photos come from iNaturalist. I pull only CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licensed photos through the public API. Every photographer is credited in-app on the screen their photo appears. The license filter is hard-coded, so CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-ND photos are automatically excluded.

It’s completely free on the App Store. No paid subscriptions or anything. You can find it here:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wildex-daily-nature-id-game/id6767213299

There’s currently about 600 species in the pool. Im working to add more. It just takes time. But as I do the game algorithm will improve.

Feedback I’d genuinely value: anything obviously missing from coverage, regional common name issues you’d want flagged, and whether the difficulty feels fair (some species are deliberately confusable, like Green Shield Bug vs Green Stink Bug). Or just general feedback is fine too!

Thanks!

Hey guys, I built MyFloralVault for anyone interested in plants. There are a bunch of features built in. An apothecary, plant identifier, community observations as well (like iNat), care reminders, a marketplace and a full social network to share findings or just to post a status of how your garden is coming along, with the community. And of course, custom plant entries and albums that you can share with the wider community or mark as private for your own private notes. It's also not limited to just plants. Upload a picture of any plant, mineral, animal, compound, anything, & add it to your albums with any description you want. Your own personal collection app.

There are other plant collection sites but I felt they didn't have the customization, or social experience I was looking for. You couldn't discover anyone else's collections of plants or sometimes the ui was either outdated or too complex for people who aren't really into plants that much, to be able to find what other's are sharing.

The app is live on iOS (App Store) and Android (Google Play). The web version is at myfloralvault.com.

Completely built by me over the last two years.

If you use this site or app, let me know any features that you would like to see added. I would really appreciate your support, thank you.

Website: https://myfloralvault.com/
App store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/myfloralvault/id6760265763

Hi everyone. A few days ago I had an idea for something that I think could be super fun - especially for kids and budding new iNatters (not sure what we're called 😄)

It's an app that does one simple thing: It shows the nearest observation to you, and updates in real-time as you walk. Basically every few seconds it scans nearby to find observations from iNat and calculates the closest, and shows it directly on your screen. The only "feature" is that you can pause it (stops scanning); super simple.

You can try it out now at https://nearestobservation.org.za

It's kind of still a prototype, as it's a web app that only I have tested so far. Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

If it's liked and valued, I'll make it into an Android and iOS app 🤓

PS. It's 100% hand-coded; no AI was used to build it (if that matters to you).

I was in a local garden when I found this huge orange beetle just hanging out on a plant, unfortunately I forgot to check what kind of plant but it's an awesome find! The common name is Gigas Longhorn Beetle while the scientific name is Stenelytrana Gigas.

But I think it Washington a spider

Central OH