I enjoy adding annotations and observation fields to observations, so if you have a particular focus that I can help with, please let me know!
I am good with birds, plants, and mammals. I understand basic insect behaviour/organisms and can recognise age groups. I’m most familiar with Europe and Southern Africa, but I’m a fast learner.
The slightly more complicated one is adding sex and life stage annotations to RG Northern Cardinal w/o sex annotation. The complication comes from identifying male vs. female and juvenile vs. adult, and the fact that you usually can’t accurately annotate observations with multiple cardinals. If you’re not very familiar with the Northern Cardinal, adults have completely coral-colored beaks, and I’m not confident in how to sex juveniles.
I like to add the observation fields:
Host plant and Host plant ID (both together) for leaf mines, galls, viruses, fungi (mildew or rust fungi for example) - anything on a plant.
I add both because different users prefer either one… Overall I prefer Host plant ID. These fields are always helpful.
Usually, I try to figure out the host plant or I take whatever is specified in notes and comments. Even family or genus level often helps.
I also like to add either Interaction-> parasite of/ parasited by (for example when I search Polistes observations for Xenos parasites)
(Whenever I feel like it, I may also add: Insect on Flower for any insect on a flower. I hope that a broader use of gives insights about which species visits what plant.)
Spiders are often not easily annotated, but if you ever feel really bored… Lycosidae are easy to sex and mark adult when carrying egg sacs or spiderlings on their back - obviously adult females in that case.
I ran into several cases where I had wished for better seasonality charts as some species are apparently easy to tell apart when taking season of breeding into account… but it can take painfully long to figure that out or to find the right observations to look at. One could basically start at any taxonomic level (family, genus, pick a species..) and would not run out of “ needs annotating” soon
Ok, so if you have a spider with an egg sac, do you annotate as “adult female” or “life stage: eggs”, or do you add an observation field for “spider egg sac?
You can easily distinguish male and female flies of the family Platypezidae* by their eyes. In males, the eyes touch each other in the middle, whereas in females, they don’t. Also, in many species the males are almost completely black, where as the females are more ornate.
I had done a lot of annotations at some point and got the graphs on the species page very nice, but I haven’t managed to keep up with them this year, so there are a lot of un-annotated ones again. If this sounds like something, you’d be interested in, I’d appreciate the help! :)
*same goes for other flies as well, but not all of them, I believe
I think the general rule with flies is that if the eyes meet at the top of the head, it is a male. If the eyes don’t meet, you need other criteria to determine the sex.
Oddly enough, this also applies to aculeate hymenopterans.
I see you are not short of suggestions! Here is an article I wrote for determining the sex of hoverflies. It was originally intended for the UK but the principles can be extended beyond; and if you stick to the subfamily Syrphinae there are no exceptions to the general rule outside of a couple in New Zealand!
We’ve done the UK pretty well now, and through the Syrphing Europe project we’ve made some progress on the rest of the continent, but that’s a lot more to do!