Quarter of a million observations!

We are excited to announce that the Australasian Fishes Project has reached 250,000 observations! This is a major milestone for the project, and we are grateful to all of the contributors who have helped us reach this point.

The milestone observation was posted by Mick Green (@driftmedia). Mick captured the image of a Reef Manta Ray on a recent trip to Dirk Hartog Island in WA. He said, "It was an incredible day on the water. We were so fortunate to be approached by a few humpback whales, observe dolphins, long neck turtles and dugongs up close, and then had some manta rays zoom past us. The manta was on the surface and quite unperturbed by our presence."

In the comments below a journal post in early April entitled We've raced past two milestones, users were invited to suggest the date on which Australasian Fishes would reach 250,000 observations. The person with the closest suggestion was @susanprior who cleverly stated "I reckon around 1 August (cos the weather is cooling, so maybe less people will be making observations)." Well done Susan. We'll send you an Australasian Fishes Project t-shirt as a prize.

With contributions from more than 7600 people, the project is going from strength to strength. As you can see from the graph, the number of observations is steadily increasing over time. Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed. Next stop will be a cool half million!