We've cracked 1600 members!

Hi fish fans,

Our Australasian Fishes Project community continues to flourish.

In early May we cracked 1600 members. We are delighted by this progress. At that time the project contained observations from 3764 people. Doing the maths, just over 40% of contributors have become project members, which is great.

Understandably there are good reasons why some people decide not to accept the invitation to join the project. Some people live in other parts of the world and have only take photos of fishes on their travels and are unlikely to return (certainly not in the foreseeable future). Others are primarily interested in life forms other than fishes (egads! 😊) and feel that they can make little contribution to Australasian Fishes. Some people appear to add a few observations then lose interest in contributing to iNaturalist. Presumably there are users who worry that ‘signing up’ will commit them to something.

There are however, iNaturalist users who regularly upload fishy observations but haven’t joined the project or forget to choose Australasian Fishes when they upload their observations. If you have dive buddies or fishing mates who fit this category, please encourage them to join the project and tag Australasian Fishes when uploading their next observation. The more observations the project contains, the more powerful it becomes.

As the graph shows, membership has risen steadily over recent years.

Thank you troops. 😊

PS. Since starting to write this journal entry, another 11 users have joined the project.