Webinar Follow up and Early Findings

Dear Contributors,

Again, thank you to everyone who has made one or more observations, they are making a difference.

This week I gave a webinar on Thursday night about this project. We had 101 logins to the webinar which was wonderful and have had some new people join our project since then - Welcome.

In preparing for the webinar I went over the data that has been generated to date.

Between your observations and observations of others in iNaturalist through the past few years we have more than 500 observations of feeding lorikeets or plants on which lorikeets have fed. We have identified 61 species of plants that on which they feed. Twenty of these have some level of toxicity and 10 species potentially produce a toxin that might cause LPS like signs. Of these ten species, four bloom or fruit only during that time or the year when LPS occurs. So the project is working, we are beginning to identify some plants that might be the cause of LPS.

However, we are not there yet and your observations between now and the end of February will be critical to this project, so keep up the good work.

All the best,

David, Lauren and Maya.

Posted on October 9, 2021 12:05 AM by david4262