Observation of the Week, 10/7/17

Our Observation of the Week is a tiny dot-seed plantain, seen in California by @silversea_starsong!

After writing this blog for about two years now, I’ve read a lot of iNat users fondly recalling that nature books or David Attenborough documentaries were what got them into nature, but James Bailey is the first one to credit his passion for nature to a video game!

“My first introduction to nature was through a video game called Animal Crossing,” he tells me, “when I was around 6 years old.”

One feature was that you could catch fish and bugs which appeared randomly throughout the world. There was a field guide to fill in, and you could donate them to a museum where they became living exhibits, similar to those tropical butterfly houses...Looking back, it is interesting how eerily similar some events in the game were to what I face today as a naturalist. Nonetheless, this interest quickly translated to real life, except for one big difference: in Animal Crossing, there were only 48 types of bugs. In real life, there were plants, birds, not to mention all the other thousands of bugs in the world. This was my first exposure to "listing", something that has probably founded my hobby more than I'd like to admit.

James tried various ways to visualize his natural history data over the years, but couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. He explains, “this problem made it hard for me to appreciate what I was really doing, and my interest actually fell, and I spent way more time indoors.” He eventually discovered iNaturalist in 2015, however. “It was a slow start, but my interest in the hobby was eventually rekindled. Now that the data side was taken care of automatically, I could actually open my eyes and appreciate the natural world...The hobby started out as mere recreation of sorts, but it now became a real, invested journey. Not to mention that iNat opened my eyes to a lot of groups that I had previously overlooked, like snails and mosses.”

His hobby brought him to the Valido Badlands of southern California this summer, where he was mapping plant populations and stumbled up on the puny plant in the above photo. It wasn’t even his favorite find of the day.

“I had knelt down, hesitantly, since the white sand was boiling in the summer heat, to photograph a colony of pincushion plant (Navarretia hamata). Before standing, I had a quick look around for ants, and noticed some odd "blobs" out in the sand. To my surprise, it was not just another piece of dirt, but Plantago! I spend a lot of time on the ground looking for things like springtails and liverworts, so I guess I have an eye for the little guys. I remember that outing most for the leucistic roadrunner!

Currently James calls himself “the epitome of a generalist.” But like the plantain, he says he finds beauty in the small and the not often noticed. “My main focus though is looking for micro-habitats and studying small-scale ecology. There are many tiny little communities that you can't appreciate from standing up, and they often have the most interesting species.”

- by Tony Iwane


- James specializes in North American ladybugs and even created an iOS app about them!

- In case you wanted to watch someone playing Animal Crossing for 50 minutes...

- James started a fantastic Amazing Aberrants project, check it out!

Publicado el 07 de octubre de 2017 por tiwane tiwane

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