If I see some butterfly larva, how can we know the life circle? Are there anyway to show the pictures of every stage of butterfly larva?
Can you explain in more detail what you would like to know? At one level, every butterfly would be the same: larva, pupa, adult, lay eggs, larva, pupa etc. Are you wanting more detail such as where does the larva turn into a pupa, how long is the adult on the wing?
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I guess you’re referring Larval instar stages like this?
This raises two issues.
- Can iNaturalist store and display more than one life stage image per species? I suspect that this would require a significant software upgrade.
- Do the images exist for all species of interest, and can iNaturalist access them? I have seen good collections of larval and adult illustrations for Lepidoptera, but assembled outside of iNaturalist. For Odonata, there are not even larval descriptions for many species.
This is an example, if I see a butterfly larva, it’s not easy to find the reference image, or if I know the species, how to know different stage of larva looks like.
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Huh? What do you mean by “store and display more than one life stage image per species”? If you are referring to taxon pages, it is already possible to select multiple images. When selecting images, it is possible to browse by characteristics such as life stage in order to ensure that a variety of forms are represented; ideally users should be doing this when editing taxon images. If certain life stages are not represented, users can edit the selection of images to add them.
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On desktop, go to “explore,” type the species name, click “about",” click through the images and click “view more,” click “life stage.”
If an observation has been uploaded at every life stage, you might be able to find them all. Even if they aren’t neatly organized into a circle, it should give you the information you want. The filter relies on annotations, though, so if it’s a rarer species, even if it’s been observed at every life stage, not all life stages may have been annotated so they won’t show up. You can go through and annotate lepidoptera observations even if you don’t know the species to help yourself find them in the future.
To organize by instar, you have to use observation fields. I couldn’t find a big project with them, but you can add &field:Larval%20instar to the end of your search url. Observation fields get filled out even less than annotations, though, so if you don’t care exactly which instar is which and just want to see them all, I’d still filter by Life Stage: Larva in the way I described
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squidtk’s reply above is the gist of the answer, although I think the observation field “Instar” might be used more commonly than “Larval instar”. Here are some examples for Monarch Butterfly:
Adult: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&term_id=1&term_value_id=2
Pupa: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&term_id=1&term_value_id=4
Larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&term_id=1&term_value_id=6
Egg: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&term_id=1&term_value_id=7
1st instar larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&field:Instar=1
2nd instar larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&field:Instar=2
3rd instar larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&field:Instar=3
4th instar larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&field:Instar=4
5th instar larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=48662&field:Instar=5
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Based on your example, and your question, I think you are looking for life-cycle diagrams. iNaturalist does not generate life-cycle diagrams. There is actually a lot of thought and design that goes into making such diagrams, and I don’t know of any software that creates them automatically.
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You can try to find an observation with the species and a value for ´Similar observation set´
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This is one of my 5th instar butterfly larva observations:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/272440733
So this is the butterfly species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/51588-Papilio-polytes
However, it’s hard to find the reference of the pictures of every stage of larva, what are the difference between this species and other similar species in this stage of larva.
there are countless species for which most of this info is unknown to science, let alone iNaturalist.
the best thing you can do to counter this is to add observation fields to larvae for which you know the instar
A neat way to browse photos of larvae is in either of these collection projects:
Insect Larvae: Grubs, Caterpillars, Maggots, etc. (insects in general)
caterpillars of the world (just Lepidoptera)
Click on Observations, then Search, and filter by taxon. It won’t organise them by instar, but may get you what you need. For example, here are observations that have been annotated as showing larvae of Papilio polytes:
Clicking on Filters and then putting “5th instar” into the Description/tags field brings up two observations of fifth-instar larvae of this species:
One of them has what look like some useful ID comments.
Incidentally, this example shows the value of both adding annotations, and of including informative notes in your observations!
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if you do this →
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/are-there-any-way-to-show-insect-life-circle/72476/12
I have a tool I’ve been working on to compare observation fields. I could probably add some sort of lifecycle view… but it would only work with whatever instars were there for the species chosen.
Observation Field Viewer
All of the observations that include the “instar” observation field also identify the plant the caterpillar was on… the problem is they use 11 different observation fields to track the plant. The tool allows them to be merged together into a consolidated view since they’re all of type taxon…
Observation Field View of Obs with field:instar with another field of type taxon that identifies the plant…
I’ve been sorta wanting feedback on the viewer anyway. I keep changing it… this time to use rate limited fetching to build a dataset. Someone will probably swoop in with something better. Or maybe tell me i’m doing it wrong, which I’d like to know anyway. :o)
This is a common butterfly species in my country. But there are not so many reference of the larva. The adult of the same genus are very easy to distinguish. But the larva especially 5th instar are very hard to distinguish, most species of this genus are green caterpillar.
maybe in distant future it can be done algorithmically for all species as we get more confident temporal and annotated RG observations.
But for now, i ask people who are rearing things to make collages and add them to iNat taxon pages such as these moths from @krishnainthewild
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As long as those collage photos also have individual posts in accordance with iNat observations guidelines… then you can link to a collage
This is an observation shows how a larva grow into a butterfly. Is this a suitable way to upload an observation? I’m afraid not, since another post I asked if suitable to merge or separate if the same individual in different date, someone list the similar situation of plant, but the top management team disagree.
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I mean it’s a cool observation. I think they’d rather them be split apart… especially since you can’t select multiple life-stages and multiple observation dates for a single observation. observation fields could be used to link the separate observations together. That’s my understanding anyway.
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No, that’s not suitable, because the observations were made on different dates but recorded as if it were a single date. Better to use the “Similar Observation Set” field: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-the-field-similar-observation-set-for-linking-observations-of-lepidoptera-when-raising-on/1018
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