Jon SullivanJul 24, 2025

Last night I was in Little River talking to the Banks Peninsula community about #iNaturalist. We're now approaching 4,000 observers, almost 184,000 observations, and almost 3,700 identfiers for the Port Hills/Banks Peninsula area. There is already so much to celebrate and the observations keep coming every day.

I'm appreciative of all the folk that came out to listen, and who asked lots of excellent questions. I tip my hat to the Living Streams Community Nursery (a Little River based native plant nursery) that organised the evening, and to the Little River Inn that hosted us. Check out the excellent blackboard that the Inn staff put out by the door. 😀

https://inaturalist.nz/observations?place_id=74374&subview=map&verifiable=any

#CitizenScience #nz #BanksPeninsula #iNaturalistNZ

Show threadJon Sullivan

One of the recent iNaturalist highlights from Banks Peninsula is this little moth, that Mel Whiting photographed in the Port Hills above Taylor’s Mistake at the end of May. It was photographed visiting a yellow flower of the native oxalis, *Oxalis exilis*. They weren’t sure what it was and uploaded it to iNat to find out.

Thanks to the identifications and comments by NZ moth experts Neville Hudson and Robert Hoare, it turns out to be a rare, and still undescribed, endemic NZ moth species, currently only known as *Scythris* “stripe”.

Robert commented “Yes, amazing discovery! I think maybe only the 4th ever seen.”

Two of those four observations were made on #iNaturalist, the other being a moth I found in the Port Hills above near the Sign of the Kiwi back in May 2022.

Every observation counts, especially for rarely seen species like these species that we know so little about.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/285550497

#Lepidoptera #mothodon #nz #CitizenScience #RareSpecies #iNaturalistNZ

Genus Scythris

Scythris from Sumner, Christchurch 8081, New Zealand on May 31, 2025 at 02:11 PM by melwhiting. Very small

iNaturalist NZ
Jul 24, 2025 at 9:32amWeb