Bird taxon showing up as vertebrate/"other animal" (= not bird) in life list

When looking at my life list, I clicked on “other animals” to see the beasties that are not birds, mammals, insects or arachnids. Oddly, a bird taxon (Piciformes) has been showing up there among the millipedes. To make it even weirder, the observation itself is of woodpecker damage to a tree, so the photo is of a tree. (The observation hasn’t been validated by anyone else yet).

This has happened on two separate days, even after reloading the life list contents.

–> iOs 10.15.2 (Catalina) using Firefox 71.0, though I’m pretty sure that the problem is not related to either of these facts

i don’t think what you’re describing here is a bug. (even if it was, i doubt the staff would make any changes to this screen since it’s so old and buggy. it would make more sense to just redo the whole screen.)

i think what you’ve done is to filter for any rank classified as “other animals” in your Life List. the subphyllum Vertebrata would fall under “other animals” because it could be a bird or mammal or bony fish or non-bony fish. the fact that the photo that showed up in the Vertebrata box for you happened to be a woodpecker is probably just a coincidence, i think. it was probably just that the last vertebrate you observed at that time was that woodpecker.

here’s what i see when i filter for “other animals” of any rank in my own Life List. note that Vertebrata shows up there for me, and the photo there happens to be a downy woodpecker, since that was the last vertebrate that i observed:

so take a look at this again, and let us know if you still think there’s an issue here. if not, are you okay with closing this thread?

OK, I tried this again, and if it’s a feature and not a bug, it’s a feature that doesn’t make sense to me at all. I don’t understand why it’s showing an organism in Aves at all since Aves, Mammalia, and Actinopterygii each have their own categories in iNat. And the other groups that are showing up are not even at equivalent ranks in the display. When I clicked on my life list and then “other animal,” I get a different bird showing up as the representative of Vertebrata and identified as a member of Vertebrata, even though this individual has been identified to the species level and is research grade, but then I also get two different jellies showing up at the genus level (not at the level of phylum Cnidaria), a planarian that’s research grade at the species level showing up at the family level but not as the only member of Platyhelminthes I’ve seen, a sea star showing up at the species level (not as a member of the phylum Echinodermata), three different genera of millipedes showing up at the genus level (not at the level of the phylum Arthropoda or even at the level of subphylum Myriapoda), two isopods, one at the genus level and one at the species level (but not in Arthropoda), a crab at the genus level (again, not in Arthropoda), a centipede at the species level (again, not in Arthropoda), and springtails showing up at the genus level, again not as Arthropoda.

I know that taxonomic ranks are not directly translatable from taxon to taxon, but this presentation that shows observations as representatives of taxa at different ranks seems bizarrely inconsistent, especially when the observations in question are almost all at the species level and research grade.

maybe what you should do in your case is to filter for Rank = species or Rank = leaves.

i’m not sure how to give a better explanation than what i provided before. Vertebrata item in the filtered list is not meant to represent only vertebrates excluding birds, mammals, etc. it’s meant to represent all vertebrates including birds, mammals, etc. so having a photo of a bird used to represent Vertebrata is not a problem because Vertebrata includes birds.

the fact that Vertebrata shows up under “other animals” is just a function of it being at a higher level than iconic taxa like birds and mammals. you can’t put Vertebrata under birds because it includes non-birds. you can’t put it “under” mammals because it includes non-mammals. but you can put Vertebrata under “other animals” because it is an animal, and it’s not just birds, and it’s not just mammals, etc.

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Life Lists is due for a total revamp soon, which will make this moot, so I’m going to close it.

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