Categories Feature Improvement - "Insects"

Either rolling ‘spiders’ and ‘insects’ together into a generalized category like “Bugs” or changing ‘insects’ → “Arthropods” (to also include aquatic species!) because not all invertebrates within that category are ‘insects’ - its been… BUGging me, ha ha

I’m a little confused by what you are suggesting, and what the perceived problem is. Does “Categories Feature” refer to the iconic taxa? I ask because these have the label “Categories”:

If so, what is exactly the issue here? It would help a lot to know what you don’t like about the current functionality, my intuition would be if I click the insect filter I see all and only insects, and that’s exactly what currently happens.

iNaturalist tries to use monophyletic groups when possible, so I don’t like the idea of arbitrarily lumping arachnids with insects (there are exceptions but only for things with very deeprooted histories, e.g. technically reptiles should either include birds or exclude crocodilians, as crocodiles are closer to birds than they are to, say, lizards). Some users might think or expect spiders to be insects, but if anything it seems like a neat learning opporutunity that iNaturalist might teach them this is not the case! Insects are closer to crustaceans than they are to arachnids, after all.

Having arthropods as an iconic taxon would be more palatable to me, but I still think this would be a change for the worst. The iconic taxa seem targeted to new users, who are probably more likely to be familiar with the word “insect” than “arthropod”. This would also still miss out on a lot of invertebrates, e.g. earthworms, sea stars, snails, jellyfish.

Having an iconic taxon for all invertebrates would also not be monophyletic (sea squirts are closer to vertebrates than they are too other invertebrates). If you do want to filter for invertebrates you can do so with URL filters, like so:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=1&without_taxon_id=355675

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That being said, having an iconic taxon for crustaceans (not monophyletic I know, but the group exists as is in iNat), another for myriapods and enlarging iconic taxon arachnids to Chelicerata would put all arthropods under iconic taxa, which would be nice.

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… while keeping baobabs, unicellular green algae and bog moss under a “leaf” (plant?) icon?
I’d tread carefully before requesting “iconic taxa for all […]”, as it might inspire others :grin:

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There are a fair amount of posts about adding/altering iNat’s iconic taxa, including at least two feature requests that are open:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-crustaceans-and-myriapods-iconic-taxa/996

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-additional-taxa-category-buttons-in-the-filter-menu-to-include-taxa-not-in-any-other-category/63293

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/need-for-more-filter-categories/74484

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/question-about-categories/65024

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Turn your focus to plants - then you will be happy. Red and green seaweed, moss and fern, conifers and flowers = plants. Cannot expect ‘engaging with nature’ to tell seaweed from a pine tree. Whatever. Is green ish.

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Type in what category/group you need in the Species search field - like “arthropods”. Then, use the Filters window and just ignore the Categories buttons.

The Species field has a lot of options.

I like that I can search for “dragonflies”, “damselflies” or “dragonflies and damselflies”.

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I can live with these imperfect categories, but I think they are quite revealing of the way humans relate to nature. It is expected that laypeople are able to distinguish between broad categories of animals. But plants and fungi? They just get one icon each :winking_face_with_tongue:

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I think plant blindness might be the most common and widespread form of field biology blindness.

Most people can identify a spider, especially in a web.

Most people are familiar with snakes, and I think we can excuse snake-like identification mistakes that require specialized knowledge: legless lizards, caecilians, etc.

But a lot of people see green, green equals plant, and that’s as far as I can go! Especially if it’s not in flower.

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