Our Observation of the Week is this Blunthead Slug Snake (Aplopeltura boa) with a Jumping Spider (Family Salticidae) on its head! Seen in Indonesia by @fhadlikennedi.

Umar Fhadli Kennedi graduated with a degree in Conservation of Forest Resources and Ecotourism from IPB University in Bogor, Indonesia, back in 2018, and credits his days as a university student with his interest in nature. “When I was a kid,” he tells me, “I really liked outdoor activities such as hiking, but I wasn’t very aware of the plants and animals around me.”

But as a university student, I studied in the faculty of Forestry in Bogor, doing a lot of fieldwork, learning about a few species of plants and animals. I also joined a student club for herpetology, and I learned a lot about amphibians and reptiles there, where I also met the Indonesian herpetologist [@mirza] who made me want to learn more and more about amphibians and reptiles of Indonesia. I’m currently interested in amphibians and reptiles, but sometimes I also take a picture of insects and mushrooms when I'm in the field (but I don't even know what the species is, just upload in inaturalist haha).

This past June, Kennedi was collecting data for his supervisor’s research at Mount Halimun Salak National Park but no cellular signal reached their lodge. So, most nights he and his colleagues (below) hiked about fifteen minutes up to a hilltop in the park to connect with the world. “I always brought my camera with me, just in case we found something interesting,” he says. 

While up on the hill we looked for amphibians and reptiles and one night, one of my friends found this snake and started photographing it. As I was taking photos a spider jumped from the tail to the head of the snake. Seeing that, I shot as fast and as much as possible, hoping to get a great picture. The photos turned out too dark, haha, and I'm struggling to make the picture better, but I'm still not satisfied with the result.

As its common name suggests, the blunthead slug snake tends to prey on gastropods, but it will also eat lizards and other prey. Some species in the slug snake family (Pareidae) have quite asymmetrical jaws, with significantly more teeth on the right mandible than the left, allowing the snake to more easily pull most snails from their shells. However, not all snail shells curve to the right (dextral) - a minority curve to the left (sinistral), and it’s thought this has created pressure for snail speciation where some of these snakes occur. “Already,” says Andrew M. Durso, “southeast Asia harbors more sinistral snail biodiversity than any other region (12% as opposed to 5% worldwide), likely in part due to selection against dextral and for sinistral shells from snake predation.” These snakes are not venomous and, as far as know, harbor no specific attraction to jumping spiders. ;-)

Kennedi (above) posts his reptile and amphibian observations to his supervisor’s Amfibi Reptil Kita (ARK) project and tells me that at first he only used iNat for herp photos but 

after a few years spent in working with wildlife, I wanted to share other unique wildlife that I found (such as insects and mushrooms). Also, the iNaturalist community is so great that, even though I'm a newbie for most things beside herpetofauna, almost always some people help identify the species that I don't know.

(Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity)

- I linked to it in the text, but I wanted to make sure you check out Andrew M. Durso’s blog post about slug snakes and snail chirality.

- Here’s some nice footage of a blunthead slug snake from Penang, Malaysia.

- This video has a nice section showing a slug snake in Taiwan attemping to eat a sinistral snail, starting at around 29:34.

- This is not the first Observation of the Week documenting an arthropod in the head of a snake!

Our Observation of the Week is the first Green-spotted Torrent Frog (Amolops viridimaculatus, 绿点湍蛙 in Chinese (simplified)), seen in China by @jianwang!

A herpetologist at the Museum of Biology Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, Jian Wang’s work focuses mostly on snakes, lizards, and anuras (frogs and toads) and he’s interested in both their taxonomy and conservation. Since he started his work in 2014, he’s “participated in the description of nearly 40 new species and the revision of several species groups,” and you can see his publications here. But this frog was seen far to the west, in China’s Yunnan Province. 

“Yunnan Province has the highest biodiversity among all administrative regions in China,” he explains.

Located in the western Yunnan, the ample monsoon rainfall results in a rich diversity of fauna and flora in the Gaoligongshan Region (高黎贡山). Scientists have conducted biodiversity surveys since the 19th century, and plentiful new species/species with restricted distribution have been discovered. With over 700 recorded vertebrates, Gaoligongshan has become one of the places I’ve most yearned to visit…Herpetofauna of the northern, middle and southern parts of Gaoligongshan are distinctly different due to Gaoligongshan’s wide geographical expanse.

In 2015 he was finally able to make it there, which is where he came across the green-spotted torrent frog in its type locality. “[This species] is mainly distributed in the southwest slopes of Gaoligongshan,” says Jian Wang. “While I was investigating in a bone-chilling stream, this fascinating creature occurred, which escaped and allowed me to make only one shot.”

Like other members of its genus, this species does seem to prefer fast-moving cool streams in mountains and hills, and as tadpole it has a suction cup on its belly to help it stick to rocks. It’s also found in parts of India, Vietnam, Myanmar, and possibly Laos. The IUCN lists it as Near Threatened, with major threats being agriculture, logging, and dams or other water management.  

“We made other fascinating discoveries on the same trip, and several new species were gradually described,” says Jian Wang (above). These include the Western Yunnan Music Frog (Nidirana occidentalis, 滇西琴蛙), the Fei’s Horn Toad (Megophrys feii, 费氏角蟾), and the Banna Parachute Gecko (Gekko bannaense, 版纳伞虎)! 

“I love all other groups of animals in the world that that iNat gives me the opportunity to read about,” he says, “[and] I'm glad to help in any way I can in identifying amphibians and reptiles/sharing interesting observations.”

- @qin_huang, who also has also worked at Sun Yat-sen University, is the subject of a previous Observation of the Week post!

- This video shows a different Amolops frog (Amolops larutensis) in a fast-moving Malaysian stream.

Our Observation of the Week is this Cockscomb Nudibranch (Antiopella barbarensis), seen in the United States by @helgeweissig.

“While I was SCUBA certified in 1994, I have only recently begun to dive regularly and a couple of years ago I started taking my photography hobby with me under water,” says Helge Weissig. “I have become increasingly interested in nudibranchs and other invertebrates but sometimes the odd fish picture will sneak into the mix.”

Helge went diving at “the wall” off La Jolla Shores in southern California last November and spotted quite a few creatures, including several cockscomb nudibranchs.

At the wall, the gentle slope of the Shores takes a steep step down from about 50 ft to up to 65 or 70 ft before dropping off more gently again into the depths of La Jolla Canyon. There is typically a lot of life on older sections of the wall (it crumbles from time to time, exposing naked clay that often stays barren for a while) and on that particular day, I found two Cockscombs [the other below]…

Cockscomb nudibranchs are probably some of the most luminous creatures one will find under water in Southern California. They are not exactly rare but most often solitary and easy to miss. Their bulbous cerrata (those club-shaped appendages on their body) often feature neon-blue tips and yellow rings while their rhinophores (the two antenna-looking appendages in the front) are light blue but often hidden or retracted.

Helge (above) tells me that by the time he was a teenager he knew he wanted to be a biologist, which led him from his home in rural Germany to San Diego. However, he eventually changed his focus to molecular biology and genetics and for the past nineteen years has “been working at an early drug discovery research and biotech company maintaining their research informatics platforms and running all sorts of data analyses.”

He only started using iNat recently but says he’s “very much hooked already.”

The ease of uploading and labeling observations as well as the very collaborative nature of identifying all kinds of organisms make it a fantastic tool for sharing observations, learning about their nature, and connecting with other people interested in and knowledgeable about them. While I mostly focus on the esthetics of my underwater photographs, I will continue using iNat to help me identify those organisms I haven’t encountered before and have not found information on anywhere else.

(Photo of Helge by Volker Kilian)

- as @anudibranchmom noted on the observation itself, the cockscomb nudibranch up top, lacking blue tips on its cerrata, looks quite similar to a tunicate colony, eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/55117299

- Take a gander at the most-faved nudibranchs on iNat!

Our Observation of the Week is this Trichia botrytis slime mold (and a Polycephalomyces tomentosus fungus), seen in the United States by @alison_pollack!

The name “slime mold” is a bit misleading, as slime molds belong to their own polyphyletic group, Phylum Mycetozoa. But Alison Pollack beautifully captured both the fruiting body of a slime mold and a fungal parasite in the photo you see above. It wasn’t her first attempt, however. “Trichia botrytis is a very pretty slime mold, and I had seen it only a few times before,” she explains.

The fungus, Polycephalomyces tomentosus, parasitizes slime molds of the genus Trichia. I had seen and photographed that fungus on various Trichia species several times, but I really wanted to find a specimen where there was not so much of it so that you couldn’t see the detail. In the woods a few weeks ago, I turned a log over and saw something that looked like it might be nice, and when I looked at it with the magnifying glass I was thrilled at what I saw - not only a formation of the fungus of exactly the kind I had been looking for, but also a clean Trichia botrytis, clearly showing the characteristic bands of that species.  A wonderful and photogenic combination!

Alison’s image isn’t just one photo - at macro distances an image’s depth of field is razor thin - but rather a series of about forty-five photos, each focusing on a slightly different part of the subject. She then used software to focus stack the images, combining the parts in focus to make  a single image with greater depth of field. That’s why both the slime mold and fungus are in razor sharp focus. 

Fittingly, it was photography that sparked Alison’s recent interest in slime molds, fungi, and other tiny organisms. As a child in the suburbs of New York City she wasn’t particularly into nature, but graduate school in Wisconsin and then hikes around the Bay Area opened her eyes to it. She carried her camera with her and began to photograph mushrooms. One day, however, she came across something new.

I took a photo, and when I got home I did a Google reverse image search to figure out what it was. I quickly figured out that it was a Myxomycete, Leocarpus fragilis. I stayed up all night looking at photos of various slime molds and reading about these fascinating organisms; I was completely smitten by their beauty and their amazing life cycle. Shortly after that I bought a DSLR camera and a macro lens so I could take better photos of myxos.  And while looking for myxos, I also found many fascinating tiny fungi. 

When I am in the woods, I am often on my hands and knees, looking very closely. What I am looking for usually cannot be seen while walking. I use a light and a magnifying lens to look for my tiny subjects. The smaller they are, the more they fascinate me! I love finding and photographing myxos and tiny fungi and sharing them with people who might otherwise never see them. My goal is to inspire people to go into the woods and look for them themselves.  

Alison (above, in Alaska) previously only posted her photos on Instagram, but an acquaintance suggested she also add them to iNat, where she tries to post most of her photos now. “It's great when experts chime in and identify what I have captured,” she says, 

and I also feel like I am contributing to science because not too many people are looking for and posting things so tiny. These days I also use iNat all the time to look for where people are finding myxos and fungi; the combination of iNat and NOAA precipitation maps helps me to plan my trips to the woods. 

Photo of Alison by Bruce Welkovich (@bwelko).

- This isn’t Observation of the Week’s first slime mo(u)ld rodeo!

- Slime molds can solve mazes?

- Check out some of the most-faved slime mold observations on iNat!

Our Observation of the Week is this Guatemalan Red-rump Tarantula (Tliltocatl sabulosus), seen in Guatemala by @ricardelremate!

Ricard Busquets grew up in Premià de Mar, Barcelona, Spain, and tells me he was always interested in nature.

I had the good fortune to grow up in a house full of books and encyclopedias collected by my father. One of these encyclopedias inspired my love for nature: the “Enciclopedia Salvat de la Fauna”. I used to enjoy snacking in the afternoons, after coming home from school, browsing through some of the eleven volumes of which it is composed. It was my favorite, and as I leafed through its pages I traveled around the world discovering incredible animals. The coordinator of that encyclopedia was Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, a Spanish naturalist and environmentalist, defender of nature, and producer of documentaries for radio and television who died too young in a plane crash in Alaska. I remember the day he died, I was 7 years old and I felt very sad.

Now an adult, Ricard resides in a place teeming with incredible flora and fauna: Guatemala! Living there for about twelve years, he’s married to a biologist and he manages a small hotel (ten cabins) outside of “the protected biotope Cerro Cahuí, harmoniously integrated in the humid subtropical forest of northern Petén, on the shores of Lake Petén Itzá,” he explains.

It was after inspecting the empty rooms of the hotel last August (the tourism industry, of course, has been decimated by the pandemic) that he encountered the colorful tarantula documented in this observation.

I entered the apartment where I live inside the hotel. As I opened the door, I moved the curtain and out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shape near my shoulder. I took a step back and then I saw it. So beautiful, so spectacular, so calm. The tarantula slowly moved through the glass of the wooden door and I ran like crazy looking for my camera to immortalize it. My wife was with me, and we both kept exclaiming, "Wow, what a beauty, what a cute little thing!” 

In the end, the tarantula landed on the ground, and what I did was to pick it up and take it to a safe place, a huge mound of stones that we have at the hotel, where we usually take the spiders and scorpions that guests find in their rooms. All life forms are respected at the hotel.

Recently split from the genus Brachypelma, members of the genus Tliltocatl occur in Mexico and Central America. Like most other New World tarantulas, their abdomens are covered in urticating hairs, which can irritate the skin and eyes when brushed off by the tarantula as a method of self-defense. 

Ricard (above) heard about iNat from his wife’s colleagues, who recommended it to him because he likes photography and nature. I can say that discovering iNaturalist has been one of the best things that has happened to me during this pandemic,” he says.

I am taking very seriously the observation and documentation of every living thing around me, with the humble intention of contributing to citizen science and suddenly helping biologists and scientists with my observations from Petén, Guatemala. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

To conclude I would like to share with you this thought from Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente:

"Man is a poem woven with the mist of dawn, with the color of flowers, with the song of birds, with the howl of the wolf or the roar of the lion. Man will be finished when the vital balance of the planet that supports him is finished. Man must love and respect the Earth, as he loves and respects his own mother".:

(Photo of Ricard by Asgeir Rossebo Almas. Some quotes have been lightly edited.)

- Nearly five years ago, our Observation of the Week was a spider that had been found in someone's ear!

- Check out our recent blog post about @naufalurfi, the top spider identifier in Southeast Asia!

Our Observation of the Week is this Amorphophallus dracontioides plant, seen in Benin by @bahleman!

Amadou Bahleman Farid resides in Tanguieta, the main town of Pendjari National Park in northern Benin (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and is currently studying Abyssinian Ground-Hornbill (Bucorvus abyssinicus) population, distribution and habitat use for his master’s thesis. He was inspired to work in biodiversity conservation by his father and uncle, who are retired Water, Forest, and Hunting officers. “They have devoted more than half of their career to activities in the fight against poaching and the conservation of fauna and its habitat in the biosphere reserves of Pendjari and W-Benin,” he explains, “which made me aware that the major issue of the 21st century is the conservation of nature.”

While he’s always been passionate about birds, Farid tells me he’s also interested in insects, plants, mammals and freshwater fish, and has taken photos of wildlife for many years 

with the goal that one day I would find the opportunity to work or collaborate as an explorer for institutions like National Geographic for the production of documentaries about wildlife and their habitats. However, they were not the best photos since I only had a small camera with a very low megapixel count.

In 2017, Farid met Dr. Horst Oebel, a German who’s lived in Benin for more than 20 years. Dr. Oebel runs the RBT-WAP | GIC-WAP program, a program that supports the management and conservation of the protected areas of the complex W-Arly-Pendjari and at the same time he is a very active member of the NGO OeBenin and manages the NGO's account on iNat.

Farid first heard about iNat from Dr. Oebel and started using it in earnest in 2019 after Dr. Oebel gave him access to better cameras. “Once I started using iNat I felt useful in conserving biodiversity through my observations by contributing to science, and scientists started to take an interest in me to be of service to them,” he explains. That includes his observations of Amorphophallus dracontioides, for which he’s the current iNat observation leader.

For a few months now I have been helping botanist Evan Milborrow (@evnep), a researcher based in South Africa, who is particularly interested in African species of Amorphophallus which are incredibly under-studied and about which very little is known. So, I help him collect and find research material (seeds from all African species of Amorphophallus), ideally with rough geographic information (the region they came from) in order to keep track of their locality and organize them correctly into a botanical collection. 

The genus Amorphophallus ranges through Africa, Asia, and Australia, as well as various islands. From an underground tuber they produce one leaf and one inflorescence. The inflorescence has both male flowers and female flowers on the lower part of the inflorescence, the latter of which are receptive to pollen only on the day it blooms. To attract flies and other carrion eaters, Amorphophallus dracontioides emits a smell “reminiscent of rotting carcass and excrement” according to POWO, and Farid concurs, saying some of the plants he found were quite pungent. According to Purdue University, the corms of the plant [I’ve seen “corm” and “tuber” used in different descriptions of the plant, does anyone know which is correct? - Tony] can be “eaten after being cut up, repeatedly washed, and boiled for one or two days” and are considered a famine food. 

Bahleman Farid (above) admins two projects on iNat, Biodiversite en Zone Girafe Niger and African Spurred Tortoises in West Africa, and tells me he’s taught more than 100 tourist guides, academics, students, schoolchildren (below), and others working to conserve protected areas. 

iNat is the tool that our NGO SOS Savane mainly uses for environmental education sessions in schools around the W-Arly-Pendjari complex through specific transects. The schoolchildren are then introduced to digital tools and discover the biodiversity of their regions with smartphones equipped with iNat.

(Farid speaks French and used machine translation for his responses, which were then lightly edited for clarity.)

Easily the most famous member of Amorphophallus is A. titanum, known as the titan arum or corpse flower. This video delves into its pollination process.

Our Observation of the Week is this mouth-brooding male Eastern Gobbleguts (Vincentia novaehollandiae) fish, seen in Australia by @emikok!

“I’m just a scuba diver,” Emiko Kawamoto tells me, “I learned how to dive in Japan back in 1994. I moved to Sydney in 2003 but I only started to dive here 2-3 years ago so I am not an experienced Sydney diver yet.” She’s been posting her her photos to iNat for ID help.

Rather than cover a lot of ground when she dives, Emiko likes to “macro dive,” staying in one place and observing the life in front of her. “I stay in a small area and watch the same critters, so my diving style can look very boring but it allows me to observe their particular behavioral patterns,” she explains. 

This technique allowed her to get some great photos of eastern gobbleguts brooding behavior over the past few years. Like some other fish, this Australian endemic engages in paternal mouthbrooding. After the eggs are fertilized, the male holds them in his mouth, protecting them until they’ve hatched (or even longer). Last March, Emiko followed a gravid female:

As I watched, she met a male and they started to dance. It looked like kissing, hugging, and holding. Then the female released two coloured egg masses (orange and white), and fertilization occurred during the ‘‘holding’’ behavior and took about 1- 2 minutes to be completed. I felt quite long, though. During this period the female held the male with her pectoral fin - the “holding” position - while the male kept his genital papilla over the egg clutch as it was being released. I was so excited when the eggs were transferred to male’s mouth. He looked very tired and could not swim with such a heavy mouth. The female disappeared as soon as the eggs were transferred.

She saw the same behavior again this year and posted her shots to iNat, curious as to why the egg mass consisted of two colors. iNat user @markmcg, with the help of a colleague, found a paper describing a similar species. It said the egg mass contained two types of eggs, “a smaller part composed of a compact white mass of small non-functional oocytes and a larger part composed of the bright orange mature ova.” (Vagelli, 2019)

Learning that the eggs are kept in the male’s mouth for days (and sometimes much longer), Emiko (above, with a sea dragon) continued to dive in the same area until she found a male with maturing eggs in his mouth - perhaps even the same one she saw earlier.

Orange eggs had become silver and I could see the developing fish's eyes. The male often kept his mouth closed, but he opened it for regular churning of the eggs so I stayed quiet, sneaking up on him, and waited until he opened his mouth so I could take photos.

After I got home, I saw in my photos that one of the eggs hatched in this mouth. I believe that they stay in dad's mouth for another 4-8 days. I hope to watch them moving and playing in their dad's mouth next time!

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- Emiko’s photo of a gorgeous sea spider (and its eggs) was iNat’s Observation of the Day last June!

- Check out the Australasian Fishes project, created by @marckmcg and curated by many others, they’ve done amazing outreach work with underwater photographers.

- Here’s some footage of a Banggai cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) - same family as gobbleguts - engaging in paternal mouthbrooding.

Our Observation of the Week is this Bent-winged Bat (Miniopterus sp.) and its Nycteribiid Bat Fly (Family Nycteribiidae) parasite, seen in Kenya by @macykrishnamoorthy!

Macy Krishnamoorthy originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but after studying lowland gorillas at the Buffalo Zoo with Dr. Sue Margulis’s team, she realized research was her true interest. She took Dr. Margulis’s “Wildlife Ecology and Conservation in South Africa” course at Canisius College and 

We followed troops of monkeys through the mountains, tried eating mopane worms (which are really caterpillars), and tried mist-netting for bats....and caught nothing! The next year, when I returned as the TA for the course, we caught a singular Myotis welwitschii (Welwitch's bat).  But that's all it took and I was hooked. I wanted to do fieldwork and I wanted to do it with bats. 

Currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University, Macy’s research has focused on baobab trees, which are pollinated by fruit bats over much of their range. “My work,” she says, 

has focused on the landscape and individual tree characteristics (e.g., height and girth of the tree) that influence the number of fruit produced and identifying differences between hawkmoth and fruit bat pollinators that might change the number of fruit a baobab produces.

At the core of it, I am really interested in the fields of ecology, mammalogy, and natural history with emphasis on ecosystem services. How can research in these fields influence our perceptions of animals (such as bats!) and provide information for conservation decisions and wildlife management?

Originally returning to southern Africa to start her work, she and her colleagues used citizen science to determine that baobabs in that region are more likely to be pollinated by hawkmoths. So, they picked up and moved to Kenya, where she encountered the bent-winged bat and its fly parasite.

My first few nights, we mist-netted for bats at the water sites. This was extremely different from my experiences netting in the United States so far, the diversity and sheer number of bats was overwhelming. On a good night netting in Texas and New Mexico (depending on where you set up), we would catch maybe 20 bats a night on a good night and all from two families of bats.  In Nuu, Kenya on two nights combined (and we shut the nets earlier than typical), we caught 90 individual bats from seven families. Thanks to Paul Webala for helping to ID/assist with the research! One of these bats was the pictured Miniopterus species and its bat fly.  It's probably the largest bat fly I have ever seen on a bat.  As someone who's interested in the bats, I've done very little with their parasites, but know that the parasites are relatively understudied groups.

Don’t all bat wings bend? What makes the wings of Miniopterus so special that they’re called “bent-winged” bats? These tiny (about 10 cm in length) insectivores have relatively large wings (wingspan = 30-35 cm) and the third finger of each wing is particularly long. “In flight,” says Darren Naish, “this particularly long finger gives these bats extremely long, narrow wings. They're fast (though not particularly manoeuvrable) fliers in open spaces, and are also good long-distance colonisers: some species are long-distance seasonal migrants.”

This bat’s parasite may not look like a fly (note the lack of wings), but Nycteribiids are definitely in the order Diptera, and specialize in parasitizing bats. Adapted to living in caves along with their hosts, many lack eyes or only have rudimentary ones, and they are quite host specific. Both sexes feed on blood, but females will leave their host every so often to attach one fully grown larva to the cave wall. The larva has developed inside of her, going through multiple instars, and soon pupates after being deposited on the wall. After several weeks it will emerge and search for a host.

“I use iNaturalist because I really love the idea that anyone can be a scientist” says Macy (above). “I think the platform encourages people to pay attention to the natural world around them and engage in cataloguing what they see.” She first used iNat years ago out of curiosity, but tells me 

Now, I think there is value in everyone whether citizen scientist to someone actually working with the taxa to upload their sightings. When I was netting bats in Kenya, it wasn't the main focus of my research (I was curious if there were fruit bat species there that could pollinate baobabs) and hadn't collected enough data to publish from. But it was still useful data, so one night, hunting through old photos, I began uploading them. From the ecologist/mammalogist side, I'm very interested in finding ways to use the data collated here.

Side note from Macy:

I could also go into the numerous reasons that bats are cool! Firstly, they are the only mammals to fly. They're the second most diverse mammalian order, after rodents. They're a small animal and though small animals tend to have a short lifespan, bats defy the rules and (longest living wild bat is reportedly at 41 years). Bats are slow reproducers, having only one or two (depending on species) pups per year. Their ability to live with a variety of diseases without becoming sick is also an exceptional feat, physiologically speaking.

- Take a look at several past observations of the week about bats!

- Calvin’s report about bats is woefully fact-free. 

Our Observation of the Week is this Poison Fire Coral fungus (火炎茸), seen in Japan by @hirabe1216!

Hiroshi Abe has been fascinated with fungi since he was a child and ended up studying mycology in both college and graduate school. His focus is on the ecology of ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, “the strong relationship between tree species and mushroom forming fungi,” he explains. “I was really surprised to know tree species cannot survive without fungal symbionts in the natural environment.”

Since graduating, he has been studying fungi of nearby Komiya Park in Tokyo as a first step towards urban ecosystem conservation. 

I think even recording species with a short description and DNA sequence data will help us understand and evaluate the local natural environment. In addition, due to the fact that taxonomy of fungi is now just developing, undescribed species are found even in the local park!

Poison fire coral fungus, however, is a well known species, and Hiroshi (along with his friend Takahiko Koizumi) came across this specimen during their first exploration into Komiya Park. “This species is well-known as a lethal mushroom in Japan,” he tells me, “[and its] Japanese name is ‘火炎茸(kaen-take)’ meaning ‘flame fungus.’

It is also said that the number of [poison fire coral fungi] is increasing as oak wilt disease expands in Japan. Oak wilt disease, which triggers mass mortality of Quercus trees nurturing birds, insects and ectomycorrhizal fungi etc., is now one of the serious problems in urban ecosystems in Japan. In fact, dead Quercus trees attacked by the disease are increasing in Komiya Park.

Hiroshi (above) uses iNat to record and share his fungus explorations, look for observations made by others, and get ID help from the iNat community. “iNaturalist,” he says, “is the great first step of citizen-science!!”

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- Poison fire coral fungus (also known as Podostroma cornu-damae) has devastating effects if ingested, you can read more here [PDF] if you’re interested.

- Once known mainly eastern Asia, it has been found as far a south as Australia. There’s even an iNat observation of one there.

- And because why not, here’s an electronic instrumental dance song named after this mushroom.

[I keep forgetting to cross-post these to the Observation of the Day project's journal...will try to do a better job from now on... - Tony]

Our Observation of the Week is this Bongardia chrysogonum (commonly known as سینه کبکی in Farsi) plant, seen in Iran by @shahrzadasa.

For nearly ten years now, Shahrzad Fattahi has worked as a bird guide, but she got her start in plants many years ago. “Iran is a country that is very rich in plant diversity,” she tells me, 

[and] at first I became interested in plants and I was able to take a short course to get acquainted with plants with taxonomy. Photography of nature was an integral part of my observations, so in the genre of wildlife photography and macrography, I expanded my activities and gradually became interested in birds and butterflies...I work and often travel alone to natural places and photograph the species observed, especially birds, butterflies and plants in different seasons.

It was on one of those trips, in 2016, where she took the photograph you see above.

During one of my trips to Mazandaran province, in a large plain called Lasem, which is full of flowers and butterflies in spring, I came across various plants, one of which was Bongardia chrysogonum. 

I remember a spring day with natural colorful flowers. A gentle breeze and a butterfly dance, along with the sound of a Common Rosefinch playing across the plains, thrilled me. After watching and photographing the species, I lay down on the grass for a short rest and watched the sky beyond the leaves, which attracted my attention more and I took two photos of it. I did not imagine that one day it could fit in a site like iNaturalist and be introduced to the public.

Shahrzad explains Bongardia chrysogonum grows in many of Iran’s natural areas, and its bright pink color attracts attention (the flowers are yellow when in bloom, however).  It’s commonly known as سینه کبکی, she tells me, which means “breast of the chukar” as it resembles that bird. The plant’s leaves, which are quite beautiful, as well as its tuber, are eaten and used medicinal purposes. A member of the barberry family (Berberidaceae), it ranges from Southeastern Europe into Kazakhstan, as well as North Africa.

After her friend @parham_beyhaghi suggested she share her finds on iNat, Shahrzad (above) signed up in 2017 and has posted over one thousand observations (and added 1,300+ IDs). She has been contacted by several students who are researching plants in the region, asking for information and photos, making her realize “how important this site is in introducing species and helping students and naturalists, and it can be a good communication bridge for exchanging useful information all over the world.

I am very happy to join this site so I can improve my knowledge and connect with other researchers and scientists of nature and use their information to learn. iNaturalist is a source of biodiversity learning in the world and it has made me much more interested than ever before.

Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- Parham Beyhaghi was the subject of an early Observation of the Week, posted almost exactly four years ago!

- Bongardia chrysogonum has been traditionally used to treat urinary tract infections, and this study shows it may be effective in treating prostate issues in humans.

- It may also be an effective epilepsy medication, according to another study.