Take that video of ants making a daisy chain to pull a millipede that, last week, had scientists scratching their heads. The footage showed a behavior that entomologists hadn’t seen before. And it was shot by an amateur somewhere in Southeast Asia.

But, then, it's not just new species or behaviors that smartphones are documenting. Sometimes a photograph with a geotagged location might be the only record of a species in that location. "I’ve come across blog posts that are making new geographic records, I’ve had tweets that are the first and currently only published records of some species," says Morgan Jackson, an entomologist at the University of Guelph.

These are the kinds of things that citizen science advocates dream of: collaborations between amateurs and trained scientists that produce real, published results. But citizen science projects are really hard to design—they have to be fun, interesting, and not too difficult for participants, while also being robust and scientifically useful. Winterton’s discovery of a new lacewing species is almost a serendipitous citizen science project—one that emerged not by design, but because a human had trawled Flickr and noticed something odd.

But how do you replicate that? There are more than eight million photos on Flickr tagged with the word "insect." Even if you try to drill down to things like "butterfly," "spider," or "beetle," you’re left with a crushing wall of photos, most of which aren’t going to be useful. That’s just Flickr. There is almost certainly a ton of useful data squirreled away in tweets and Facebook albums and YouTube videos all over the place. It’s finding it that’s the problem.

"You know how hard it is to find a certain Tweet—so trying to find one you don’t know exists is nearly impossible," Jackson says.

Here’s an example. This weekend, a strange-looking spider perched itself on the bow of my kayak. When we stopped on the side of the river for a snack, I snapped a photo of my spindly masthead and sent it off to Twitter, asking: "Bug people, what is this thing?" Within a few minutes I was informed that it was a Tetragnathid, also known as a "long-jawed spider." If you search Instagram, there is even a tag for "tetragnathidae," with 28 photos in it.

"Some of those aren’t tetragnathids, but that’s okay," Jackson says. He’s just happy people are tagging bugs more specifically than I did by saying "what is this thing."

Rose Eveleth/Instagram

Jackson thinks that if scientists can teach people just a little bit more about bugs—or any animal or plant, really—users could help filter some of the pictures they are taking. In his ideal world, I would know enough about spiders to be able to identify the "thing" on my kayak to the family level—tetragnathidae, in this case—and tag it for scientists to find.

It’s not just users that have some learning to do to make their photos helpful, though. Scientists also have to think to look to social media for information. "Not many taxonomists that I know would think to look through Facebook or Twitter hashtags," Jackson says, "even though they wouldn’t think twice to fly halfway across the world to sit in a foreign museum for a week to do essentially the exact same thing."