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Comment by xipho | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the most successful "natural" social-network out there, well deserved. Now if we can just get citizen scientists cheap scopes and better camera lenses so we can actually make those photos of critters < 2mm useful (at scale) we'd see research potential rocket.

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With the adoption of multi-lens phone cameras allowing better zooming the general quality of insect observation photos has improved (some, there's still a lot of terrible photos). I actually started submitting a lot more insect observations in iNaturalist after I got an iPhone 12 and other folks on the forums have mentioned upgraded phone cameras have improved their observations and increased the range of what species they can submit. I'd love getting more zoom, there's micro-moths, lot of small aquatic inverts and things I'd be happy to be able to observe. Individuals do have some incentive to find new species over time to increase species counts, I'm up to 590 identified insect species and am trying to top my bird species count at 632. Improved cameras over time help improve model training and add species that are harder to get photos of as tech improves.

I submit most interesting insects I find, fun to learn about them. These are some of my favorites

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155914507

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/136708118

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/169121886

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8443142

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8445065

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89986236.

Oh, tiger moth - nice! I have been working on my Lepidoptera for a while always love seeing those and sphinx moths are so cool. I'm up to six species of sphinx moths, the tessa sphinx is my favorite:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/176100012

Also that cottonwood dagger - whoah! I checked out your lifelist, you've found a lot of really interesting insect species, I'm in Austin and the differences are pretty dramatic and quite interesting. You can see my insect life list here: https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/steven_bach?view=tree&...

That moth is really neat! The cottonwood dagger was what led me to inaturalist as I had no idea what it was. Been posting stuff since and learned a lot.

What camera do you use? This one is so nicely zoomed https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637

Almost looks like an image from an electron microscope the way the grass stands up.

Just an iphone, grass isn't real though.

If anyone has suggestions for a smartphone scope/lens, I'd be happy to hear them.

The Moment lenses and cases are probably the most well-received lenses for mobile devices. They have macro lenses as well: https://www.shopmoment.com/mobile/phone-lenses

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