net.au · 12 hours ago

One Million Bug Photos, One App

Jess Ward-Jones has loved insects since childhood -- particularly the velvet worm, which she describes with delight as spraying "Spider-Man slime out of their face." Now she coordinates a citizen science initiative that has turned that childhood wonder into something quietly astonishing: since October 2025, ordinary Australians have uploaded over one million observations of invertebrates using nothing more than a phone and a curious eye. The project, called Bug Hunt Australia, feeds every image into the national biodiversity database, where CSIRO scientists can study creatures that have never been formally catalogued -- of Australia's 300,000 native invertebrate species, 200,000 remain undescribed by Western science. A six-year-old named Isabel photographs cicadas on weekend walks through Kangaroo Valley. Families who couldn't get their kids off the couch are now crouching in bushland, peering at beetles. Beyond the wonder, there's urgency: citizen observations have already flagged invasive fire ants, yellow crazy ants, and a new incursion of the Asian honey bee near Brisbane -- species responsible for 66 percent of extinctions since colonisation. "Every observation adds another piece to the puzzle," Ward-Jones says -- and in a country with so much undiscovered life, the puzzle is vast, and everyone's welcome to help.