From California Magazine
I, Naturalist
By Nathalia Alcantara
In 2021, when he was 17, Prakrit Jain’s mother drove him to a dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert and waited nearby, stargazing, while her son crouched to probe beneath loose rocks and logs. The moon was just a crescent, a good time to look for scorpions, which glow greenish-blue under UV light. Some biologists suspect the fluorescence may help the poorly sighted creatures sense moonlight and stay hidden. For Jain, it makes them visible. He loves the pitch-dark nights when all he can see is the glow of their exoskeletons in the beam of his flashlight. “You have to walk very slowly and carefully,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun.”
By then, Jain had already spent years photographing and identifying scorpions, but the one he found that night was special: It was new to him, and yet he’d seen it before...
While most people his age go down rabbit holes as they scroll through Instagram or TikTok, Jain gets lost scrolling through flora and fauna on iNaturalist, a digital platform and smartphone app originally created in 2008 at Berkeley’s School of Information, the master’s project of I School students Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda...
iNaturalist was conceived by MIMS alumni Jessica Kline Ken-ichi Ueda, and Nathan Agrin as a 2008 final project. The project is still run by Ueda and recently received the Heinz Award.
