Earlier today I took various photos of a large gathering of caterpillars I witnessed on a hike. I have photos from two different areas where I found them and I have shots of both individuals and large groups of them. The group shots number up to dozen or more individuals in one photo and I’m not sure if I should make individual observations for every single bug or if it’s better to leave those larger groups as just one observation? Since they’re all climbing on branches and stuff, each individual is at varying levels of focus and I feel like it’s pointless to upload like 20 observations of blurry caterpillars, but maybe I’m wrong about that so I’m asking here!!
If they were all the same species, I’d make 2 observations - one from each area where you saw them. Put a few good photos in each, and say roughly how many you saw there if you wish.
I totally agree, but it should be noted that there are some on iNat who vehemently defend the opposite approach. They support reporting every individual as a separate observation using iNat’s guidelines.
I’ve seen an observer photograph 50+ Monarch caterpillars all within a radius of about 50m and report them individually on iNat.
This kind of thing isn’t particularly unusual. Of course, I can’t say anything critical about it.
Technically, each observation should be for your interaction with an individual organism. Therefore, you could post a group multiple times. Practically, as an identifier I say, please don’t do that! It just wastes my time. Figure you are posting your interaction with one of the individuals the group. Your posting copies for male and female, adult and immature, etc., wouldn’t feel like a waste. Or post several individuals if you wish, especially if there is something different about them or you have some point to make, even if that’s something of interest only to you. However, you’ll find that few of us post a flock of 20 birds, for example, as 20 observations.
I suppose if you are trying to document variation in color pattern, growth form, or some other feature of an organism you find in a group, you might want to post a series of individual observations of multiple examples instead of one group observation. However, in most cases, a single observation of the group with maybe some close-up shots of individuals would be the way I’d do it.
Being an ant person, that’s all I tend to upload, so I usually do 1 observation per small colony, and 2-3 if they seem large or unnaturally dense. I imagine in this case I would upload 3. But I dunno if eusociality changes things that much.
Agree with the approaches people have suggested here. If there are a few good examples of different sexes, life stages, phenology, etc., in a group I’ll maybe make a few obs, one for each, and annotate them respectively. For example, I made two telegraphweed obs out of a large population this past weekend, one to show a plant in flower/bud the other to show in fruit.
You could use an observation field like I did in this project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/observations-with-estimated-numbers-of-population-or-group-size
You could also join and use the project.
Note: if you add an observation to a traditional project the field suggests only those projects that you are a member of. Though you only have to remember roughly the name of the project to find the way back to an observation field that you probably use only now and then.