May General Meeting

If any members spot bluebottles offshore or at the surface in open ocean conditions, Jess would love photos and a quick note of the location, surface conditions, and anything noticeable about how they were sitting or moving. She's trying to understand what they look like when they’re just being bluebottles in their natural environment, not after they’ve been pushed to shore. And if anyone notices fresh strandings or big influx days, that would also be really useful for her to know.

She runs a national citizen science project on iNaturalist where people across Australia can upload stranded bluebottle observations. It’s been super helpful for tracking arrivals, relative abundance, size patterns, and species occurrence, and it may help us pin down seasonal reproduction as the dataset grows. Here’s the project link: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/bluebottles-in-australia-physalia-species

She also shares project updates here: https://www.instagram.com/bluebottle.tales/