How to find invertebrates in your garden
Welcome to the Garden Invertebrate Hunt on iNaturalist. It's a project encouraging everyone to try out some simple, standard methods for hunting for garden invertebrates. We ask that you consistently post at least the first three species > 5 mm (1/5th inch) that you find with each method you try.
When you add an observation to the project, it will ask you to select which method you used. It also asks you to describe how you found your invert (e.g., what flower was it on, or what garden object was it under).
In this article, we summarise the methods, with links to more details, and there's instructional videos.
Why?
There's a miniature universe of fascinating creatures living in our gardens. Some are beneficial, some are pests, most are going about their lives largely unnoticed. By taking a closer look at them, and doing so in a standard way, we can uncover the diversity of invertebrates living in people's gardens.
Join in and together we'll be able to answer some interesting questions about which gardens have the most invertebrate diversity, and why, and how that's changing over time.
Simple methods
Below are our simple invertebrate hunting methods for you to use. None of them take long to do and you should be able to do them all with gear you already have in your house. Clicking on any one of the methods will take you to a more detailed page describing it [which I'm making now].
- visual search
- searching plants for damage
- beating big plants
- flower visitors
- under things on ground
- at night light
- pitfall trap
- pan trap
Video tutorials
Check out the following video tutorials on how to add your garden invertebrate photos to the the Garden Invertebrate Hunt project.
This video collects some invertebrates using the "beating big plants" method:
The next videos are on how to upload invertebrate photos to iNaturalist from: an iPhone, an Android phone, and from the iNat website.
If you're curious, you can click here to see the 11 species of invertebrate found from beating the branches of that one plant in the videos.
Mike Bowie (@ecoman) has also prepared instructional videos on the methods and you'll find those on our methods page.
Who?
The Garden Invertebrate Hunt was started by Mike Bowie (@ecoman) and me (@jon_sullivan) to support our entomology teaching at Lincoln University in New Zealand. We're hoping others will be interested in giving it a go too.
At the time of writing, Mike's up to 268 invertebrate species in his home garden and Jon's currently found 216 species in his garden. (Click on those links to see what we're up to now.)
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