Diario de apexmark

Mason Farm Biological Reserve - https://ncbg.unc.edu/visit/mason-farm-biological-reserve/

Old Bynum Bridge, Pittsboro, NC

I'm preserving this comment from shanesmicroscope on a microbe observation I uploaded in case I ever lose it:

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A couple of things I think I should point out about iNaturalist and microbes since they may not be obvious:

-iNat's taxonomy tree is not authoritative, nor is it complete. As I'm sure you know, there is no single, agreed upon taxonomy structure. The structure here is kind of a mashup of several popular structures. Bruce recently did a sweep of the ciliate taxonomy and unified it to his own best interpretation. But if a species is missing it's probably just because nobody has observed it here, not because it's not valid on this tree.

Aside from that, you'll soon come to recognize the helpful identifiers. Michael (plingfactory) is the resident rotifer expert. Bruce (bdstaylor) can identify ciliates like nobody's business. Roman (roman_romanov) is great with algae. Never blindly agree with anyone, but I'd give their opinions more weight within their domains.

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To anyone reading - feel free to comment with further information if you wish. As of 3/31/22 I haven't yet decided when to upload additional microbe observations. My feeling at this time is to move deeper into birding and possibly on to plants in the future. The discovery of iNaturalist has really altered how I think about my goals for these interests. I was once keeping offline lists and trying to build websites to manage everything which iNaturalist does (including taxonomy trees) and I just kept getting burned out. So the discovery of iNaturalist has really energized me and brought renewed interest to birding, for instance. Unfortunately I don't have precise location information for most of my birding observations so I'll just have to go obtain them again!