If you’re not familiar with a stromatolite (and the similar thrombolite), it’s a unique microbial community with an ancient evolutionary history and extant in just a few small marine ecosystems, most notably Shark Bay in Western Australia. Unfortunately, per iNaturalist, there’s no good way to classify these observations other than as Bacteria or Cyanobacteria. I periodically see these identified on here as Australomedusa thrombolites—this is a hydroid associated with this ecosystem and the only taxon containing the word thrombolite.
It would be far better if there was a non-Linnaean category for this group. I understand that this is generally frowned upon here, but I also understand that exceptions are made on occasion. This warrants an exception. There needs to be a good way to categorize these observations.
Rather than flagging a taxon with this request, I thought I’d open it up to discussion here in the forums.
It would probably be best to create a traditional project(s) for these groups. Similar things have been done for galls, leafminers, and other morphologically-similar-but-taxonomically-diverse groups.
This doesn’t solve the issue of users not knowing how to identify these organisms, nor does it make these observations easily searchable for anyone who comes here hoping to find a stromatolite.
One such exception that formerly existed was for Physalia, which has several undescribed morphotypes that had their own pages. I actually flagged that one to be removed, but clearly the technology exists to create such non-Linnaean categories on here.
The observation field for “Microbiome” emerged from that thread, and I have just added the additional value “microbialite” as a new option in case it could be useful. People could use that if they like, even if just as a stopgap ahead a more precisely gradated new observation field for microbial carbonate sites.
Either way, I do like how the observation field method works out- records are id’d by 2 people as Life, the DQA “can’t improve” is ticked, and the field is added. Then it gets filed in Casual, but immediately recall-able as a set with similar records by clicking through on the field and value.