Diario del proyecto Creepy Crawlies Count Zimbabwe 2021

Many thanks to all who have helped with identifications. We are climbing towards 300 species covered by our 720 observations. Of those, about 30 are the first iNaturalist records for those taxa in Zimbabwe, and another 30 only have one or two other observations. We also have a couple of undescribed species and one grasshopper that was last seen in 1963! Well done everyone, and we look forward to the next one :) I will post one more time in a month or so with a more detailed stats breakdown.

A huge congratulations to all participants in our Creepy Crawlies Count! Despite some rainy weather, we managed to log over 700 observations* of hundreds of different species* over the weekend, showcasing just how much diversity we can access even in a lockdown. To put these numbers in perspective, this weekend contributed about 10% of the total arthropod observations recorded on iNaturalist in Zimbabwe. We logged more spiders than were uploaded in the decade from 2008 to 2018!

A highlight for me was seeing over 100 observations from the 9 or 10 participants who joined iNaturalist in 2021. Special mention to @nick-de-swardt who managed to observe 17 chafer species in a single tree, including some extremely interesting specimens! I hope all of these naturalists had a great time and we look forward to their future finds.

@moira_fitzpatrick topped the leaderboard with an incredible 228 observations! We remain in awe of the hard work she continually puts in to push back the boundaries of our knowledge.

Thank you to all who participated. Wishing you and your garden companions a happy 2021 :)

*We will wait a few weeks for observations and identifications to settle before we can calculate the 'final' figures, at which point I might send out a quick stats breakdown and/or a video with some highlights