Why scientists want your photos of wildlife eating lunch

This isn't directly about home energy upgrades, but it's a science story worth knowing about if you're curious about wildlife around your property. A citizen science project called Who Eats Whom is asking people to upload photos of animals eating other animals (or plants) to the app iNaturalist, which identifies species and geotags the images. Scientists then use those photos to map out who preys on whom, building a more detailed picture of food webs than older methods like watching bird nests or examining animal droppings.

So far the project has logged 17,000 feeding interactions across 5,700 species in more than 100 countries. Researchers say this crowdsourced data helps them track how ecosystems are shifting as the planet warms — species are moving toward cooler areas, changing who eats whom in a given region. The photos can also help spot invasive species early and figure out what native animals they're displacing from the food chain.

For a homeowner, the practical angle is simple: if you have a smartphone and notice a hawk catching a squirrel in your yard, an ermine hauling off a rat, or any other predator-prey moment, snapping a photo and uploading it to iNaturalist feeds directly into this scientific database. It's a low-effort way to contribute real data on the wildlife living around your own property, and to see, through the project's interactive food web tool, how local creatures connect to each other.