Captive/cultivated or wild on rearing larvae etc

[pudding4brains]

Now it’s getting a bit mixed up in conversation. I see you have also added the Oenopia larva to the set of curated images.

For the sake of argument I have removed the Acrosternum images from the “curated” set again.

What any visitor sees in the standard situation is this:

Note that the eggs are nowhere to be seen, not even in the “Recent observations” slider at the bottom of the page.

Now I click on the “View More” link and get this:

Even if I click on the Life stage selector (as seen above) I cannot choose to see “Eggs”.

Now I go back to the main page and click on “show all observations”. I get this:

Again - none of the observations with eggs.

I appreciate that the photos in the selection on the main page are a curated set and that the standard to show there if nothing is selected might be “need id + rg” or some such.

But if I just enter my observations and don’t go stampeding about and bumping my photos to the spotlight via the “Curate” option, the system full well chooses to not ever show them to anyone looking at the species pages in any normal way.

[pudding4brains]

Hi kiwifergus,

was working on the other answer/upload while you were writing.

Thanks for the input.

Yes, I understand that it is a default choice, but I’m glad to hear that I’m not totally mistaken that it is a default choice not to display these images in any accessible way, just due to the fact that these are marked “captive”.

There is “captive” and “captive” of course. While I appreciate uploading captive monkeys or cows is not very helpful in documenting wildlife (except for an almost extinct breed of cow maybe), I feel that documenting life stages by keeping these under controlled circumstances for a while is a different matter.

With the way the system is set up as it seems, it becomes very tempting to just go “sod it” and not tag these as captive. Too much trouble and “pushing your own work” involved to getting them appreciated otherwise.

[fffffffff]

They’re shown in observations and that is where most of people look (I don’t know, at least me). I have no idea why they’re not shown in photo gallery with “any” filter. Don’t see the point of removing photos, I added them not to please you, but because they suited the species photos collection. Again, as @kiwifergus said iNat focuses more on wild interactions.

[kiwifergus]

@pudding4brains

But if I just enter my observations and don’t go stampeding about and bumping my photos to the spotlight via the “Curate” option, the system full well chooses to not ever show them to anyone looking at the species pages in any normal way.

it’s not iNats mission to proactively show images of eggs to visitors who browse the site in a normal way. It is to provide a mechanism for recording observations (with a strong focus on wild) and encourage and support community around that. There are similar issues with “data quality” etc, in that many who come to iNat seem to have preconceived ideas about what iNat is and should be doing. iNat provide the mechanisms for you to find egg observations that are captive, should you wish to do so. If you think there should be egg observations showing BY DEFAULT, then make observations of eggs in the wild… once reared and adults ID’d, you can go back to the observation and put an ID, and link in a comment to the reared adults (captive/cultivated) observation with a note that they were reared and identified from the adults.

[kiwifergus]

@pudding4brains

With the way the system is set up as it seems, it becomes very tempting to just go “sod it” and not tag these as captive. Too much trouble and “pushing your own work” involved to getting them appreciated otherwise.

many do, and I have resorted to that a little myself. For instance, once marked captive/cultivated, a plant(*) drops out of the Needs ID in the identify pages. Many of us will omit setting the flag until we get an ID, which technically is against the guidelines, but as long as you are fastidious about going back and setting the flag, I can’t see the harm. And if I got too much push back from the community, I would stop doing it.

You will find that most of iNat is about “guidlines” more than rules… with a great deal of flexibility to work around them. I would caution against listening to just one persons advice on anything (unless staff or developers of course!), as there are lots of different view points on pretty much everything in iNat. Get a feel of what the community as a whole are saying, before taking anything on too rigidly…

And grey areas… don’t get me started on grey areas! A lot of iNat is binary choices… wild/captive, juvenile/sub-adult, to go to species or sub-species based on photo, and so on. When a “grey area choice” is not available, just make your best guess as to which applies and then let community concensus formulas work out the decision! And if you feel what the system applies is not right, raise it in discussion, and you may even change others’ viewpoints too!

(*) not just plants… any observation!

[kiwifergus]

@kiwifergus

And if you feel what the system applies is not right, raise it in discussion, and you may even change others’ viewpoints too!

but I should add, the marginalisation fo captive/cultivated is a pretty established thing, and not something that is likely to change. Many of us have tried, and have just found ways to fit in regardless!

[pudding4brains]

it’s not iNats mission to proactively show images of eggs to visitors

Of course, that’s not what I’m talking about. The point is, that it is proactively hiding these. And no, it is not easy to find the “captive” observations. You would kind of have to know beforehand that there would or could be such observations that may contain the images of life stages that you’re looking for and then maybe be able to get to them with some nifty filtering (but I don’t see just how yet).

See the example of my screenshots above. Anyone coming here and looking for eggs in the photo collection as presented normally cannot find them.

Of course I cannot go and find these eggs in the wild on any given day just to please procedures at iNat. I consider myself very lucky that I got by a batch of eggs of this rare species “accidentally” the way I did and I’m trying to let other people enjoy a bit of that “luck” by presenting them here so they may have an impression of what those eggs may look like.

But after all this it is my understanding that I’ve come to the wrong place for that.

[pudding4brains]

@fffffffff

Don’t see the point of removing photos

That was just to show what the situation looks like if you don’t manually push your own images into the curated set.
I’ve moved them back in now ;o)

[fffffffff]

It’s “hiding” any captive observations, it’s not the guidelines’ fault that those weren’t photographed in the wild, though for me if that matters so much you could get your first photos of eggs with female laying eggs as wild (I guess it started laying eggs quickly after arrival or?), with no time of observation, but those afterwards definitely don’t count as wild.
Again, there’s no such thing as pushing photos, % of interesting and not replaceable observations in captivity is very low, so it’s not hard to add photos if there weren’t any before once in a while.

[kiwifergus]

@pudding4brains

Of course I cannot go and find these eggs in the wild on any given day just to please procedures at iNat. I consider myself very lucky that I got by a batch of eggs of this rare species “accidentally” the way I did and I’m trying to let other people enjoy a bit of that “luck” by presenting them here so they may have an impression of what those eggs may look like.

there are many taxa for which there are ZERO observations! There are many for which there are ONLY captive/cultivated observations. There are many that we have put captive/cultivated photos as taxon page images, and many that we have replaced in due course with “better” wild ones. Some we replace wild photos with captive cultivated ones, because they better portray identification characters …

THIS IS WHAT WE DO as an iNat community! It’s what our game is about… If you think it is not ideal now, I would hate to think what you thought of it 5 years ago when I joined… Here in NZ we would get maybe 20 observations a WEEK… we are now getting 956 a day (Jan 23, 2021), and we are filling out all those taxa pages despite this filtering out of captive/cultivated…

[pudding4brains]

Well, let’s resume that you’ve been able to clarify why the system behaves (imho) somewhat unpredictably and maybe “unfair” due to the single “Captive” tag (unfair as in excluding obs from getting an ID or RG or whatever).

Even if I don’t agree with those choices made, a few “workarounds” have been presented so for what little I intend to contribute (time and other things to work on) I shall roll with that.

Thank you both very much for your time and patience in showing me how I may work around some of these design decisions!

Cheers, Arp

[trscavo]

@pudding4brains

that looks like a lot of work

Using observation field “similar observation set” to link a bunch of observations is not a lot of work (although your mileage may vary of course). I used it last season to link a bunch of observations of the same population:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?order=asc&order_by=observed_on&place_id=any&subview=grid&verifiable=any&field:Similar%20observation%20set=45921146

Adding an observation to the set is a couple of keystrokes, that’s it.

[pudding4brains]

Adding it to the similar set is not too bad.

What makes it tedious is entering everything as a new observation, retyping the name for every observation, setting a date, clicking “Captive”, adding some note, finding back the link to the original observation where the series starts and adding that to the note and going back to the start obs to add the new obs to the note there.
As opposed to just adding some extra pictures to one obs and editing the note on that one obs.

Next I would have to go back to the species overview, select “Curate” and decide if I find the images worthwhile to be featured in the main set.

That bit is still a bit iffy. I can either choose to prominently push them forward in the main set, or to not have them displayed at all. There is no choice to tell the system that it is okay to just show them in the total set of images shown with “View More”. Either full monty or not at all.

For now I’m choosing not at all because I don’t want to flood the main set with just this one project.

Similar set:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:Similar%20observation%20set=68681792

View more:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/881920-Acrosternum-rubescens/browse_photos

[pmeisenheimer]

So here’s the thing. iNat is a free to all, not for profit tool for learning about nature that permits people to gain a deeper appreciation of the biodiversity all around them. Any scientific value that accrues to the posting of observations (and considerable scientific value does accrue) is secondary to its primary educational function. The modestly funded platform is maintained by a pretty small staff and a bunch of volunteers who are running like crazy to stay ahead of massive, lightning fast growth in its user base. It does a bunch of stuff well. It is home to a really interesting bunch of people who are smart, funny, helpful and occasionally charming. As somebody who also found the captive/cultivated conventions arbitrary, my unsolicited advice would be to be glad for what it is and a little less annoyed by what it is not. They are abitrary but there are reasons for the practice and they are explained in various topics in the forum. iNat is not perfect. Not likely ever to be. Still pretty cool, at least from where I sit.

@pudding4brains

What makes it tedious is entering everything as a new observation, retyping the name for every observation, setting a date, clicking “Captive”, adding some note, finding back the link to the original observation where the series starts and adding that to the note and going back to the start obs to add the new obs to the note there.

So for your existing observations, duplicate the observation, delete the photos that don’t apply to the new observation, change the dates, etc. and post. Rinse and repeat. For new observations use Edit Observations to enter duplicate information across multiple observations and then fill in the details of the indiividual observations.

[pudding4brains]

Thanks for your opinion Peter, it is appreciated :o)

Having been an active user of some other platforms like this (that have also, thankfully, grown like crazy) and having had a good look at many, I full well understand the point you’re making. Having these platforms is a fantastic way to engage people with nature, make them more aware of everything that’s out there, fragile and worth protecting and not in the least an incredible boost in the amount of scientifically usable data and photo reference that’s being created. That last aspect is just truly mind blowing, compared to what we had available 15-20 years ago(!) So, good job of all involved!

And none of the platforms is perfect. As staff is stresses thin on all of them, it usually takes patience and ever repeating discussions/remarks/reminders to get even the smallest changes implemented. Also, insights of what is needed/helpful vary hugely between sub-communities such as birders, entomologists, fungi hunters and what have you and it will always be a struggle to find a way to deal with all those needs without upsetting the others.

As I’m just getting to know this platform, and while I’m very, very impressed by a lot of the software base (very slick and nifty!) I do run into things that “don’t work for me”, design/procedure choices that I don’t understand. I filed a bug report the first day (solved the next - impressive speedy performance!!), so I also bring forward other issues that make me trip.

Part of that surely is due to me just not understanding all the tools available yet, but some things may or may not be usability issues that others may struggle with too, so I think it best to write that down and not just eat it all up with an “it is what it is” attitude.

In the process I get some valuable pointers to work around things or to better, more efficiently use what is offered and the “community” gets feedback on what is perceived as weird/cumbersome to new users.

For example: I’m very impressed with all the options for entering and editing data/observations, such as the nifty “cards” for every photo, the possibility to batch edit those by selecting a few and others not and the batch edit option in the edit dialogue for existing obs and all that.

But, what didn’t work for me - in this case - is that the "Duplicate* observation copies “stuff” into the new one, but exactly the things I didn’t need. It does not copy the species name, so you have to enter that again, it does copy the the date and location, but in this case I don’t need those (I want to apply a new date and there is no location). It also copies the photo(s) (I’m a bit puzzled by the use for that), so I have to disable those before saving and it didn’t copy the “note”, so I have to fill that out again.

The exact things I could have used from the old obs (species name, notes, captive tag) are blank and all the things I didn’t need are transferred (date, location, photos …) So the friendly advice here along the lines of “there is no problem, just duplicate the obs” kind of misses all that.

Now this is surely a “special” usage case and for some other more common usage cases the whole “Duplicate” dialogue is probably just exactly what you want it to be, but for this it wasn’t.

In hind sight it may have been smarter to just save up the next 4-5 development stages and enter these as new observations all at once (not one by one, after shooting/selecting pictures for each) and then use batch editing options to fill things out.

But this is getting off-topic.

[thebeachcomber]

@pudding4brains

It also copies the photo(s) (I’m a bit puzzled by the use for that)

This is for when a photograph contains 2+ species, e.g. pollinator on a flower, predator and prey, and duplicating allows the same photo to be posted twice, once for each species

[pudding4brains]

To summarize: The question (more or less) was how to handle multiple stages of a development documentation and what to do with the “Captive” tag.

The answer is:

• Enter each new stage or photo session as a separate observation
• Link the individual observations by means of the Observation field “Similar observation set”
• Apply notes with explanation and links to the other observations to the Notes field

Be aware that most of the above can be done more efficiently by uploading all at once and using batch editing options, so wait until the end of the project before uploading anything or you’ll be doing the same work multiple times.

Also: Tag all photo shoots in any form of controlled circumstance as “Captive” and live with the fact that this will result in exactly zero exposure to the community for identification, or usage as photographic reference or general usage for that matter, unless you proactively go to the “Curation: Edit images” dialogue on the main species page and push your images into everybody’s face by making them leading, or “chosen” or some such for the species in general.

There is no middle ground - either you make your photos “chosen” by curating them into the main photo set on the species page, or the observations that you do not take this action for will be banned to the dungeons of oblivia.

[pudding4brains]

@thebeachcomber

This is for when a photograph contains 2+ species, e.g. pollinator on a flower, predator and prey, and duplicating allows the same photo to be posted twice, once for each species

Yes, okay, I see that usage - thanks for chipping in!

[pudding4brains]

I’ve decided to file the issues on the photo overview page as a bug report. Some things there just don’t add up:

By “curating” my images of eggs into the main set of photos for this species, these now do show on the main page, but on the photo page I still cannot select “Life Stage” eggs.

Also, as melodi pointed out, it’s maybe a bit weird that even Quality grade “Any” keeps all captive photos from showing. Had this not been the case the discussion would have been unnecessary.

P.S. Bug report filed:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/issues-with-selectors-on-species-photo-page/19792