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SPERRYVILLE, Va. — We do the darndest things to entertain ourselves out here in the country. One night last month, I participated in a moth rave.
A few of us got together at dusk, put up a white screen outside and hung a full-spectrum light over it. Then we waited until dark.
Before long the guests began arriving: The "variegated midget," the "definite tussock moth," the "confused Eusarca moth," the "northern flatid planthopper" and the fittingly nondescript "ambiguous moth" (Lascoria ambigualis) - part of a veritable air armada of winged insects in orange, pink, blue, green, brown and white, all drawn to the screen.
But the bugs weren't what interested me most. I was observing the humans.
Izabella Farr and Jeff Clark, a couple from Northern Virginia, attend moth parties such as these weekly during the season, sometimes in their own backyard and sometimes with others they meet through iNaturalist, an app that combines artificial intelligence identification and social networking tools to build a community of millions of nature lovers. Drawn to the light as surely as the moths are, they check the app to see how the AI engine identifies the insects, and then they upload their photos to share observations with others on the platform.
They called out their excited findings to each other:
"There was a crazy hopper nymph!"
"The wasp is going to parasitize these eggs!"
"No, it's not diptera. It's hemiptera."
"This poor Anisota is making very poor decisions about where to lay its eggs."
The Latin was flying almost as fast as the insects. "When you're getting hit in the face continuously, you know it's a good moth night," Clark advised me as I extricated one from my collar.
Another moth made a beeline for Farr's neckline. "No boob bugs!" she said, repelling its advances. "If I don't wear the right clothes they get into my décolletage," she explained. "On crazy nights you end up with them in your underwear."
Clark elaborated. "We'll drive home an hour and we get in bed and there's stuff flying out of our hair."
Now that's a party.
Nature geeks both, they met because of iNat. She was interested in him because of his expertise in identifying plant galls, abnormal growths often caused by insects. "I saw that he was big on galls," Farr told me, "so I contacted him."
"Galls get the gals," Clark added.
Their romance began with a shared fondness for plant parasites. "A bit unorthodox, but whatever," Farr said. They were "best nature friends" for a couple of years before becoming romantic, then moved in together with their kids.
They're now some of the most prolific users of the platform. Farr, 51, has logged more than 101,000 observations since joining in 2019. Clark, 52, spends more of his time as an "identifier," confirming or correcting the AI identifications in others' posts. He has done this 36,000 times.
The pair are sought-after guests at regular "bioblitzes," when iNat users get together in the flesh and spend a day in the woods, fields or streams identifying plants and animals. They'll then assemble for pizza and beer and, weather permitting, a moth rave.
"It's very atypical social media," Farr observed.
We often hear about how social media stokes division and removes us from human contact, and AI appears to be heading down that same path. But this isn't preordained. iNat shows that social media and AI can be designed to bring us together.
iNat is different in part because it's a nonprofit that doesn't depend on algorithms to maximize engagement. Instead of pursuing the bottom line, its mission is to bring people closer to nature. Ultimately, the organization hopes to mobilize an army of new conservationists.
"Social networks can be pretty toxic, and I think those companies get forced into that by the bottom line," Scott Loarie, iNat's executive director, told me. "AI is straight on that track as well. At iNaturalist, we see these technologies as a tool, but a tool for good outcomes, humanity-based outcomes."
He admits that avoiding the dopamine-addiction aspect of social media "has probably stunted our growth," but he likens the enterprise to Wikipedia, also a nonprofit: "We're all working together and producing this amazing thing that's bigger than the individual."
iNat and its sister app, Seek, have 7 million users per month on average. Many use it only to point their phones at plants and animals and get an AI identification, as Google Lens and other apps also do. But about 400,000 users post photos each month, and about one-tenth of those serve as identifiers.
Users have logged about 300 million observations of 100,000 plant and animal species. They "fave" and comment on each other's observations, message each other and have a forum for discussions. Some users make political statements in their profiles, but iNat has vigorous content moderation to keep nastiness out.
The numbers are tiny by social media standards, but it's a foundation for a real community and not just a virtual one. iNat users hold tens of thousands of in-person bioblitzes a year - forging countless friendships, as well as iNat couples and iNat wedding bioblitzes. The organization's annual City Nature Challenge drew 106,000 people last year in 1,000 cities; participants observed 1 in 20 of all known species on the planet that day.
"A lot of our problems with the environmental movement is that it's so top-down," says Loarie, who aims to turn the movement "on its head."
The platform democratizes science by giving anyone with a smartphone the knowledge only trained biologists used to have. These citizen scientists have become a rich data source for chronically underfunded academic researchers; iNat users' observations have been cited in nearly 7,000 scientific papers.
Neither Farr nor Clark is a trained scientist. She's a native of Romania who worked for the Peace Corps. He's a software engineer. But she has produced more than 63,000 observations categorized as "research grade." And he used the iNat platform and community to launch a website, GallFormers.com, that collaborates with universities and has identified over 1,000 galls previously undescribed by science.
Ultimately, iNat is attempting to turn this knowledge into activism. The nonprofit's chairman, Dick Raines, a Virginia neighbor and former CEO of Carfax, describes the phenomenon as "iNat eyes." Once your AI-empowered eyes can identify the plants and animals around you, you become more connected to them - and you want to do everything you can to protect them.
My first bioblitz was in May, at Sunnyside Farm and Conservancy in Washington, Virginia. There were 32 of us, and we went around a circle introducing ourselves.
"I really like fungi."
"I'm interested in wild edibles."
"Really into moths and other bugs."
"Herps but mostly snakes."
"I get really excited about plants."
"Plant galls," said Clark.
"Everything alive," said Farr.
The organizer was Bert Harris, director of the Clifton Institute, an environmental nonprofit that manages 900 acres of native habitat in Warrenton, Virginia. Carrying a butterfly net, binoculars, two cameras and a backpack full of other gear, he led our platoon into the woods, where everybody started snapping images.
"Let the Hunger Games begin," Farr proclaimed. She found a weevil in a mushroom. Clark found a midge gall on a black cherry tree. "Galling is the new birding," he quipped. Others found a black snake, a bagworm, a zebra swallowtail and a prairie warbler. Then, a commotion.
"Bert! Bert!" somebody called, and he hurried to the scene. It was a rare hoverfly that looked like a bee, and he netted it. "There's a radical syrphid over here," he called to the others, who surrounded him to take photos, paparazzi-style, of the captured insect in his fingers.
One woman said she thought it was a microdon because of its long antennae. "No," said Harris. "I live for microdons, and this is not one of them."
The rest of the day continued in a similar vein. A metallic borer produced ooh and aahs. A discovery of lyre-leaf sage generated a ripple of delight. Somebody said she thought the goldenrod she found might be edible. Farr started chewing on a clump of it.
One man donned waders to net newts and insects in a pond. Rea Manderino, an entomologist, shook trees to see what bugs fell from them. At one point, Clark and Farr showed her a gall full of wasp larvae.
"Weirdos," Manderino said. She clarified that she was referring to the larvae, not her companions.
But Farr wouldn't have been offended. "We're all weirdos," she said.
The nature banter continued through the afternoon. At one point, the property owner, Nick Lapham, came by. "I see a lot of socializing. I don't see a lot of botanizing," he joked.
But of course the socializing was part of the botanizing. "That's the wonderful thing about these bioblitzes," Farr said. "You constantly learn from other people, and it forms a community." (After Farr and Clark got to know Harris and his wife, Eleanor, at bioblitzes, the couples took a dragonfly-spotting vacation together in North Carolina.)
The iNat explorers identified 851 species at Sunnyside Farm and Conservancy that day, led by Farr, who came up with 373. Clark had 163. Actually, make that 164. At dinner with the group, Farr looked in a mirror and saw that a large dog tick, potentially disease-carrying, had attached itself to her neck. She screamed for Clark to remove it, which he did. But first he took a photo of it to upload to iNat.
The results were much the same at a second bioblitz I attended with Farr and Clark in July, at the Raines property in Castleton, Virginia. This time, 26 people identified 801 species. Farr topped the leaderboard (the bioblitzes aren't fiercely competitive, but iNat ranks the top observers) and Clark found a highly unusual "Bug Sputnik fungus." Afterward, Harris emailed the findings to all participants, beginning with a sentence I never expected to read: "The headliner is a rare liverwort."
By this time, I had developed a serious case of species envy. I had been mostly a lurker on iNat, and I had uploaded observations of only 37 species on my own property in Virginia. Even if I added in my wife's 42 observations, it was pretty weak. So I asked Farr and Clark if they'd pay me a visit.
A few days later, we were wandering my woods together. Clark spied a hackberry mosaic virus, an aphid on a Carolina elephant's foot and a family of maggots inside a black walnut. Farr, trying to photograph a spider on Clark's boot, lifted up his foot and sent him sprawling onto a spicebush.
Deeper in the forest, they came upon a mushroom. "I think it's a bolete," she said, then reconsidered. "Whoa! It's a lactarius." With that, she put the fungus in her mouth and chewed. "It's not bitter," she reported. "Smells like fish."
Clark saw my horror. "It's not poisonous - likely," he reassured me.
Farr survived the nibbling of what they later identified as a hygrophorus milkcap mushroom, a "choice edible," according to iNaturalist.
After dinner, we gathered around the moth light. They called out insect species as if they were incantations - Manduca sexta, Biston betularia - and, during lulls, they spoke about the peculiarities of certain specimens of Homo sapiens.
"Our kids, they tolerate us," Farr said.
"They think we're crazy," Clark said.
"Get off of me!" Farr shouted. A large conehead katydid had landed on her head.
By the time they were done, I had 773 observations at my place of 445 plant and animal species. Even better, I had two new friends, and we hugged goodbye when they left. In our age of trolling and rage-baiting, it's gratifying that an app can do all that.
Dana Milbank writes a column about reclaiming our humanity and restoring our connections at a time when politics and technology are alienating us from each other.
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