Reminds me of the "discovery" of synchronous fireflies in 1990:

>Scientists got wise to the presence of synchronous fireflies in the U.S. in the 1990’s, thanks to the efforts of Faust, a citizen naturalist. “Growing up in east Tennessee, we called them lightning bugs. They're just part of summer,” she says.

In the early 1990’s, Faust read an article in a science news magazine that said there were no synchronous fireflies in the Western Hemisphere. “I thought, ‘Ours are synchronous – who do I tell this to?’” she recalls.

She wrote a letter to researchers, who came to Tennessee and studied those fireflies for the next twenty years.

[src] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/g-s1-935/synchronous-fireflie...

There's a lot of stuff in the world that's unique and special, but isn't common knowledge on the internet. I think more people should go out and look around for themselves!