Could a community project consist of bug trapping effort photos, without specifying one species? This project idea involves a large number of people with bug traps that would submit weekly photos of their bug trap. They would take a photo of the whole bag of bugs, rather than each bug individually.
Would this make sense for iNat? Perhaps there’s a better way?
It does not fit the iNaturalist definition of an observation. As per the help page: “An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location.”
How to Make an Observation : iNaturalist Help
Its not forbidden to have photos with more than one organism present - this doesn’t violate iNat’s definition of an observation. This scenario is no different from a pictures of a multispecies flock of birds.
That said, I don’t think it would be very effective. If only one observation is made, only one ID can be made. If lots of duplicates are made, that would be ok, but it seems quite unlikely that profitable IDing could be done for many insects. Most insects require detailed photos to allow for IDs. As such, I wouldn’t recommend a project based on this approach.
What is the goal of the underlying, real-world project? Are people trying to check for the presence of a particular species, trying to track the number of observable species, something else?
A better way is to either highlight the relevant species for the observation or obscure the others.
I’ll sometimes submit the same image with multiple species in it, but with a circle over whatever species is relevant for that specific observation.
Simply submitting a photo with a bunch of species in it without specifying which individual one the observation is for invites confusion, argument, and is not especially useful, as each observation needs to be of a single species, and the initial observer needs to make the distinction as to which individual(s) in the image are the primary subject.
I can only see it working if the people taking the photos would put some work in to edit their photos to focus on an individual specimen or species. Say you have one photo with 20 bugs on it. First, when you start to look closely, you’ll see that oftentimes, of the 20, there might only be 10 or so different-looking bugs. It’s pretty easy to crop the photo to just show one at time, or at least center the one you’re interested in getting an ID for. Do that as many times as necessary and post the results and you wouldn’t get any objections from the iNat community & it could turn up some interesting stuff.
As others have said, a photo of the entire set of insects in the trap would be okay to include as context for the observation of each notable bug found among them. To get reasonably fine IDs on these bugs, the observers would benefit from taking multiple pictures, preferably at least one per organism and ideally including shots from different angles. Capturing detail is key. The macro feature on most phone cameras would be enough for many IDs.
Agreed. Like so many iNat submissions, the effort the observer puts in at the front end will determine how much effort is reasonable from IDers. A photo that includes multiple bugs is probably not going to show any one subject very well.
will be IDed as insects. With 236K existing obs.
I don’t see the value to the observer, and not appealing for an identifier.
I mean, technically you could do that, but I’m not sure it would work very well on several fronts due to the reasons mentioned above.
If what you’re trying to avoid is people having to photograph every single bug in their traps, maybe you could ask that they take a photo of what appears to be one of every species, noting in the observation how many of the bugs in the bag looked to be that species, and possibly attach a photo of the entire trap contents to one observation? It’d rely on the people being able to reliably tell the species apart, which isn’t great, but it’s better than trying to get everything into one observation and do anything with that at all.
How does a bug trap work? Is that one week’s worth of dead bugs?
Is there currently a way to mute a project so that observations from it wouldn’t show up in my needs ID pile?
I understand that invasive species management is important (and that death is natural and etc), but personally I would prefer to opt out of having to look at pages upon pages of “look at all these insects I murdered”, regardless of how well they will be edited.
If these are kill-traps and the collected bugs are dead, there’s no reason other than an absence of effort for photo’ing them as a group. Photos of individual bugs, even just a representative sample, should be doable.
Well, searching the help page didn’t turn anything up, but one possible workaround is to set your URLs to exclude specific observers. That would get pretty long and potentially tedious if you want to exclude several, though.
yep, you can exclude observations from a specific project in explore or identify by adding ¬_in_project=[project ID] to the url. (for more on additional search options beyond what’s displayed in the filter menu, see how to use iNaturalist’s search urls)
If it’s just a bag of bugs, then the only way this would work is to empty the bag, sort them by appearance (I won’t say species, because some closely related bugs look identical to the casual observer), and then take high definition photographs of each collection. Or take photos of each individual big, which I recognise could be a nightmare if there’s hundreds.
If it’s a sticky plate, then you could at least get away with taking an HD photo of the whole plate, and then cropping for each bug and uploading each cropped image as a separate observation. I doubt the cropped images would be good enough for any serious identification, but it’s better than a single observation with a multitude of bugs on it that just gets labelled “insects”.
Although… If it’s a plate, then it would also be simple to just photograph each bug with a macro lens…
Ultimately, we’re just looking for one species, spotted lanternfly (SLF). Volunteers are provided a live trap that collects few to many insects. Every week, they will submit a photo showing all the bugs they’ve caught. I’m determining if iNat will be where they submit their weekly photos to.
If I’m only interested if SLF is present, then a bag of bugs without any SLF may not make sense for iNat. Perhaps someone may have an idea on how this might work in iNat. I’d gladly take suggestions, if anyone has them. :)
Given that SLF is pretty distinctive, if you want to use iNat for this, I would give the volunteers images of the various SLF stages and have them photograph and submit any SLF in their traps. But if you want to check the images yourself or if it’s equally important to document absences, I would set up a Google Form or a bunch of Dropbox folders or something where volunteers could submit their bug trap photos and any additional metadata you don’t already have. But as many people have already pointed out, “here’s a photo of 50 bugs and I’m not focusing on any one of them specifically” is not a good fit with how iNat observations work
This is good to know. Thank you all for your thoughts!
And it goes without saying - let the world know if you find SLF in Southwest Michigan. :)
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