Tukuk-OSWildlife Atlas
16 species · real photographs · no stock images
Sixteen animals are chosen by hand because their stories teach something real — migration without a teacher, a carnivore that eats bamboo, a fish that never grows up, a crab whose blue blood tests every injection given to humans. Each page pairs a plain-language account with research-grade photographs posted by the iNaturalist community, credited exactly as the photographers and their Creative Commons licences require.
The 16 species you can meet here
🦋 Monarch Butterfly
Famous for a two-to-three-generation migration across a continent each autumn — no individual makes the round trip, yet the map is inherited. Milkweed…
🐅 Bengal Tiger
The most numerous tiger subspecies, mostly inside India’s reserves. Fewer than 4,000 remain wild — an increase from the ~1,600 lows of the 1970s, proo…
🐆 Snow Leopard
High-central-Asia ghost: fur the colour of scree, a tail nearly body-length for balance on cliffs. Counted from camera traps and scat DNA because almo…
🐼 Giant Panda
A carnivore’s gut on a bamboo diet — it must eat 10+ hours daily. Downgraded from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2016 after reserve expansion grew wild n…
🐘 African Savanna Elephant
The largest land animal: up to 6 tonnes, ears that work as radiators, and a matriarchal memory for water across decades. A keystone engineer — whole l…
🦊 Red Fox
The widest-ranging land carnivore on Earth — native across the northern hemisphere and introduced (and damaging) in Australia. Hunts rodents by hearin…
🦉 Barn Owl
Nearly cosmopolitan, living with farms for a reason: a single pair reaps over 1,000 rodents a year. Its face disc is a tuned parabolic antenna; flight…
🐢 Green Sea Turtle
Named for its green fat, not its shell — adults graze seagrass meadows, keeping them productive nurseries for fish. Returns to the beach where it hatc…
🐝 Western Honey Bee
The managed pollinator behind roughly a third of food we buy — though wild pollinators do the unsung majority. Waggle dances encode distance and direc…
🌙 Luna Moth
Pale-green satellites of eastern North American forests; adults have no mouthparts and live about a week on fat reserves alone. Tails on the hindwings…
🐿️ Eastern Gray Squirrel
The city squirrel of two continents — introduced into Italy and Britain, where it outcompetes and hybridises with the native red. Plants forests by fo…
🦅 Harpy Eagle
The world’s strongest raptor by talon grip, taking sloths and monkeys from the canopy. Near-threatened: it needs unbroken rainforest and vanishes wher…
🦎 Axolotl
A salamander that never grows up — keeps gills and breeds as a larva. Critically endangered in the wild (one canal complex in Mexico City) while lab a…
🦀 Horseshoe Crab
A 450-million-year lineage older than dinosaurs. Blue, copper-based blood that clots on bacteria made it the medical safety-test for injections; spawn…
🐝 Buff-tailed Bumblebee
Can buzz-pollinate — shaking flowers at flight frequency to blast pollen loose, the only way tomatoes and blueberries set fruit well. Thermoregulates …
🐠 Ocellaris Clownfish
Lives immune inside a stinging anemone thanks to a protective mucus coat, and all are born male — the dominant one turns female when the queen dies. M…
What “research grade” means
On iNaturalist, an observation earns research-grade status when the community independently confirms the identification — usually several qualified human eyes plus automated checks. It is the closest thing ecology has to a peer-reviewed photograph, which is why every wall below filters to it.