Request: In annotations, add Life Stage = Egg for Animal Kingdom
Context: Eggs, especially gastropod and insect eggs, can be difficult to identify even within the correct Class.
Why this request/change would be helpful:
Being able to annotate to egg at the Animal level will help these observations get found and identified.
Annotation will not get deleted in the course of discovering the species.
Current Problems:
An observer might often know something is an egg, even if they have no idea what species it is from. But they can’t annotate to egg until the species is ID’d farther than Animal.
If a second user disagrees and the Community ID goes back to Animals (Kingdom), and the Annotation for Life Stage: Egg is deleted. example:
Technically people could annotate things as eggs that are not eggs… But other users can disagree and fix this oversight. It doesn’t seem like something that would happen often(?)
The great majority of animals produce eggs, although the eggs hatch internally in placental mammals or (for example) Viviparidae gastropods. Some species reproduce by budding (Porifera) or have alternation of generations (Cnidaria), reproducing with budding or with eggs.
Giving the option to use the “egg” annotation more broadly would allow identifications to be made more precisely. If an annotation is wrong, someone can disagree with it.
I moved the above two comments to this request and I went ahead and made egg available to Kingdom Animalia except Placentalia. I recently did something similar witih gall, which can now be added to something that’s IDed as “Life”. If anyone knows of families or above that don’t lay eggs which someone might come across while naturalizing, let me know.
In both cases, if something ends up being IDed as a taxon that’s an exception for that value, the annotation will go away. So if something IDed as Kingdom Animalia is and is annotated as egg, then is eventually IDed as a rodent, the egg annotation will be hidden.
First of all thanks for expanding where this annotation is available - it helps in a lot of situations.
However: the “evidence of presence” annotation allows one to add multiple values, but the “life stage” does not. Why not multiple annotations for life stage? Wouldn’t it be great if one could annotate an animal near its eggs, or even in the process of laying eggs? Or adults together with juveniles of the same species? Or a pupating caterpillar?
Beside offering more flexibility, as a side effect this would also allow other people to offer alternatives to annotations beyond just agree/disagree.
I think the reason for this is because an observation is supposed to be for one specific individual organism - allowing multiple life stage annotations would mean that an observation is for multiple organisms since one individual can’t be in multiple life stages at once. There are cases where multiple evidences of presence for one individual organism can be present together: Track + Scat, Scat + Organism, Bone + Track, etc.
The best solution for multiple life stages would probably be to make one observation for the adult and a second for the egg/s, and provide a link to the other observation in comments/notes or via an observation field. I also think that a more formal/structured way to link observations (which has been suggested elsewhere) could help with this, because I agree that having this kind of info can be valuable.
There’s some squishiness here on iNat (especially with observations that include >1 individual of the same species in different pics which are rightfully IDed to species), so I don’t think there’s any perfectly “clean” solution.
