gcwarbler 的日誌

I was taking a look again at the earliest images that I've scanned and uploaded to iNaturalist. Those date from the late 1960s (see below). There are now thousands of earlier images of organisms on iNaturalist but the majority of them are images of museum specimens of plants, insects, mollusks, etc. So I began looking for the earliest images of organisms in the field, so to speak, using the simple filters on the Explore page.

I quickly had to qualify my search of old observations on iNaturalist. First, I summarily ruled out those museum specimens, and since I wouldn't expect to see photographic field evidence prior to 1900, I started my search at the beginning of the 20th Century. I also disregarded the unfortunate set of modern observations with erroneous observation dates (evident from high quality digital images dated to the 1900's, etc.).

I began to uncover a number of "observations" from secondary sources like images out of newspapers of beached whales, captured sharks, etc., and photos from published research papers. Those certainly provide "evidence" of an organism, but the dates are sometimes estimated or very approximate and the original "observer", i.e. the photographer, is rarely stated. These include such examples as a Pel's Pouched Bat from Niangara, Congo, presumably a captured specimen and dated May 27, 1913, documented in a Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, and uploaded in 2014 by @jakob :
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/604690

So I began combing through observations chronologically, looking for the earliest first-hand personal evidence of living or recently dead animals or plants.

There is a photo of a public gathering around a Great White Shark, presumably captured off the coast of Turkey in 1920, and uploaded in 2021 by @gorkialkan.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/93239174

The earliest image of any animal which is not a captured or museum specimen seems to be the following beached Rorqual (Baleen whale) in Tampico, Mexico, dated February 4, 1922. @josecastaneda2 uploaded the image, stating that it is from the digital Historical Archives of Tampico.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/102773699

The earliest first-person, non-photographic account of an organism seems to be W. C. Russell's notes on Yellow-bellied Marmots ("woodchucks") in Elko Co., Nevada, recorded in his field journal for July 13, 1935, and uploaded by @floydch in 2019:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/26545985

And--drum roll, please--the earliest first-hand, field photo on iNaturalist of a living organism seems to be this Koala documented in Victoria, Australia on December 31, 1935. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/77862210
I've left a message for @nimzee, who uploaded the image in 2021, for more details on the photographer, etc. It does not appear to be a commercial or secondary source image, so I'll look forward to learning more about its provenance.

The earliest observations of any plant uploaded to iNaturalist are apparently some European Larch trees in the background of a set of family ski vacation images in the French Alps, taken by L. Hunault in January 1936, and uploaded in 2021 by @mercantour.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/67659308

It gets a little difficult when trying to pin down the earliest first-hand, first-person photos of an organism, since it isn't often clearly stated that the iNaturalist/uploader was the person who took the image. But there are some likely candidates.
In 2020, @hoaryherper uploaded a couple of herp pics from his childhood. The earliest is one he took of a Blue Racer grabbed by his friend John Evans on June 20, 1949 in Ohio:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/47768061
@hoaryherper also uploaded an image of himself (taken by John Evans) with a captured Prairie Kingsnake in Pennington Co., South Dakota from June 21, 1955:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41106492

@americanisopodologist uploaded a couple pictures of recently-caught fish at Chincoteague, Virginia in June 1955. These are akin to the above documentation of a Great White Shark but these are family photos, in the first instance taken by his grandfather:
Red Drum: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/106281440
Billfishes: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/106281439

My late pal Greg Lasley got minimal documentation with his dad's Bell and Howell movie camera of an Eastern Cottontail in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on/about September 19, 1962, during a family trip:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/52178520
And just 10 days later, about Septermber 29, 1962, found himself with his family in La Rochelle, France, using the same camera to document a Gray Heron:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/52178521

My earliest iNat observation is a shell I'd collected in about 1958 at a beach near my boyhood home in Southern California, but just recently photographed and uploaded:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/199153060
My own earliest first-hand field image dates from May 1969, a butterfly photographed in Taiwan with my first new SLR camera, a trusty Minolta SRT-101:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/69211543

So I offer a challenge for anyone to mine the iNaturalist database of images to find earlier personal, first-hand, field observations. What can you find?

I spend a lot of time trying to identify moths—my own images and moth observations from other iNatters. Aside from the mass of observations already identified on iNaturalist, the most prominent online resource in my arsenal is Moth Photographers Group, maintained by the Mississippi Entomological Museum of Mississippi State University,
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/Plates.shtml
There are lots of resources to help with identifications on MPG, including the very useful “Try Walking Through The Moth Families”,
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/WalkThroughIndex.shtml

I highly recommend that page as a starting point if you are not familiar with moth families, especially the micromoths. I come back to that index time and time again, even though I’ve been studying these darned things for over two decades.

But undoubtedly the majority of my time on MPG is spent combing through the main plates of moth images to try and find a match to the moth of interest. You’ll find two slightly different sets of these plates, both with the same large set of images. The traditional one uses the “Hodges Check List” numbering sequence:
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/Plates.shtml

MPG has also arranged the thumbnail plates under the newer “Phylogenetic Sequence”, which uses the “Pohl numbers” from a more recent checklist of Lepidoptera of North America.
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/Plates2.shtml
It doesn’t really matter which index plate set you use because eventually clicking on any moth thumbnail on MPG will take you to the same species page.

Once you’ve decided which set of moth family thumbnails to look through (from either of the above lists), you have a choice of going to a set of index pages (known as “plates” in MPG terminology) showing either “Collection Specimens” or “Living Moth Photographs” (see the above screen capture). The Collection Specimens have square thumbnail images of the left wings of mounted museum specimens. Anything that has been photographed and uploaded to MPG will be seen on that set, and I’d guess that includes maybe 50 to 70% of the micromoth species and >95% of the macromoths of North America. You’ll see small button links to L, M, and S pages, meaning large, medium, or small size pages. Most modern internet connections and speeds handily support the large format; choosing the “L” format gives you more species on a page and thus fewer thumbnail pages to wander through. Here’s a link to a typical page of Collection Specimen thumbnails and a screen capture of an example of the first line of thumbnails you might see on a typical page of Collection Specimens:
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/pinned.php?plate=28&size=l&sort=h

Note that an MPG “plate” for a given family or subfamily will usually have two to several “pages” of images (small numbered buttons just above the family header). Don’t forget to look through all of the pages before moving on to the next (or previous) plate.

The “Living Moth Photographs” are an alternative to the Collection Specimens and it’s tempting to go right to those pages since we are normally trying to identify an image of a live critter, but keep in mind a very important caveat: IF a moth species has NOT been photographed in the field (and the image made available to MPG), it WON’T be on the Living Moth index pages. And a great many moths, especially micromoths, don’t have live photos available, so using only the Living Moth index plates can lead to overlooked possibilities. Always check a potential ID against the Collection Specimen plates to look for similar species. Also, the Living Moth index plates have two options, Slow and Fast. The Slow set displays one line of images per species and often has multiple image for a given species—very useful! Here's a link and a screen capture for a typical Slow page of living moths:
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/slow.php?plate=28&size=l&sort=h

The Fast set offers only a single image per species, which of course can’t include all the variation within a species—and a reminder, these are only for species which have been photographed alive. Here's a link and a screen capture for a typical Fast page of living moths:
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/fast.php?plate=28&size=l&sort=h

Again, modern internet and wifi download speeds are such that in most areas, the Slow index plates, with their multiple examples, are very convenient and most useful.

Another fairly recent innovation on MPG which can be useful is the “View by Region”, which allows you to subset all the possible species to view only those for which MPG records are available in a given region of North America or a given state.
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/AboutRegions.shtml

Links on each side of the View by Region button take you to an explanation of these viewing options and the list of available subsets. But another important caveat: When you look at only a regional subset of all images, it ONLY displays those species for which the MPG database (and map) have an explicit record in that state or region. For common species that’s not a problem, but for uncommon species or something you might be looking for at the edge of its range, MPG may not have a state or regional record for the species—even though the species is illustrated on the full set of MPG plates—and the species won’t show up in your geographical subset. ALWAYS check the full array of species for all of North America if you can’t find a species match in the geographic subset you look through.

One final trick I employ when I really settle into a detailed image search involves the window setup on my desktop computer screen. These searches can involve a lot of clicking back and forth between windows and browser tabs. So I have an advantage with a large screen on my desktop Mac which allows me to set up a search like this:

In the above example, you can see that I have my browser open to the MPG Collection Specimen plate, but I also have tabs available back to the original iNat observation and to MPG Living Moths, and to BugGuide as well. To minimize having to click back and forth among tabs (e.g., to iNat), I have downloaded an image from the iNaturalist observation—in this case an unidentified moth from @jcochran706—opened the downloaded image in Preview, cropped the image closely, duplicated it, and rotated the two versions to give me standard MPG angles of view. I arrange the two versions of the image side by side with my browser page so that the visual comparison with either the left-wing museum specimens or the right-facing live moths (standard for MPG) are immediately comparable to the subject iNat moth. The ease of finding a match for a given image of a moth (or any critter) has a lot to do with visual perception and our brain’s pattern recognition abilities. Anything I can do to facilitate those visual and mental processes will make moth identification that much easier.

Easy-peasy, right?!

Acknowledgements: I must always thank Founder Bob Patterson, Editor in Chief Steve Nanz (@steve_nanz), and all the staff and volunteers (such as @krancmm, @blocky, etc.) working on MPG who make this incredible resource available.

p.s. The screen captures of the MPG site above are sourced from the website itself but individual images are copyrighted by the listed photographers.

Moth Photographers Group. 2022. http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu. [accessed 5 May 2022].