Australians' backyard bug photos just topped one million
Since launching less than a year ago, the citizen-science project Bug Hunt Australia has collected over one million public sightings of insects and other invertebrates — already helping catch invasive pests.
The Invasive Species Council and Invertebrates Australia are celebrating a milestone for citizen science: more than one million observations of insects, spiders, snails and other invertebrates have now been uploaded from backyards and bushland across the country.
The idea behind Bug Hunt Australia, which launched in October 2025, is simple. Anyone can look, snap a photo, and report any creepy crawly they come across, turning an ordinary walk outside into useful scientific data logged on the naturalist platform iNaturalist.
Those everyday photos are already doing real work. The observations have helped researchers detect invasive species such as fire ants, and just last week citizen scientists and biosecurity experts helped catch an incursion of invasive Asian honey bees near Brisbane.
It is a striking example of how curiosity, multiplied by a million small moments of noticing, can genuinely help protect the ecosystems people share with the smallest creatures around them.
This is a summary. Read the full story at the original source:
Read on Good Good Good