Fail whale on search for a name

I also get the fail whale, but I when I plug Alansmia stella into the search box, I get a 2-option drop-down menu that appears. If I select one of the options from the drop-down menu, it works. If I just press enter, the fail whale appears. Screen shot below.

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Hmmm, when I did the same using the Search box, the Observations page for that species came up, indicating “no results found” – which is true because there are no submitted records.

If I type “Alansmia stella” in the search box, two options show up, pressing enter results in a whale, selecting the first option results in “no observations” and selecting the second option results in endless hourglass (two arrows chasing each other).

Typing “Alansmia stell” and pressing enter results in just the first option appearing and pressing enter results in :

Search Results for “Alansmia stell”

All Taxa Users Projects Places

Alansmia stella | View Observations

Alansmia stella is a species of plants with 0 observations

Other Names: Terpsichore stella, Grammitis stella, Ctenopteris stella

I confirm exactly this behavior from my machine. Further, if the second menu item is chosen, the URL contains “taxon_id=null” so I suspect there’s a database problem with “Alansmia stella flava” that is messing up the search for the species. A taxon search for the subspecies turns up no result, and the taxon info for the species shows no subspecies defined. Oddly, typing in “Alansmia stella flava” and hitting return also results in the fail shark, even though there is only one choice in the dropdown menu.

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I’m now getting a similar problem with Adenophorus sarmentosus rockii, where the name of the taxon shows up in the search box but is linked to “null”.

It looks like the null taxa got fixed…but then apparently as I was trying to import them from EoL (I successfully created both manually), iNat reimported them as null taxa again. Now I can see my own manually created Alansmia stella flava in the dropdown, together with another ungrafted one that has a null ID. Same for Adenophorus sarmentosus rockii.

No fix yet–I’m still able to see the null taxa in the dropdown for both of the cases I mentioned. These are presumably not the only ones. Is there any way to fix the importer to avoid creating null taxa, or run a periodic maintenance query to help find and delete these?

I found another one that I assume might be failing due to a dieresis in the name: Helicoön ellipticum. It exists in the database, but has no taxon id and clicking the name in search (or hitting enter) brings up the fail whale.

image

I assume Helicoön ellipticum was brought in via external name providers (it’s not possible to create a taxon with a dieresis directly in iNat). It should be swapped into Helicoon ellipticum, but the taxon change screen won’t find it to swap.

image

The other thing I noticed is that searching for Helicoon ellipticum in the header search and hitting enter also causes the fail whale. I guess because one of the taxa it’s trying to load in the search results is Helicoön ellipticum.

So I don’t know why all the other taxa in this thread are null, but it looks like a dieresis (and potentially other characters) will cause a null taxon on import from external name providers. And that a single null taxon in header search results will cause a fail whale.

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I’ll put this in my report this week.

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I have the same issue for Cypraea hammondae dampierensis (I think). Feel free to merge here for accessibility:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-result-gives-null-whale-shark/13924

I knocked out a bunch of ungrafted cowrie subspecies thanks to this new page and I thought I’d try a normal iNat search to see if there were any others. I typed in Cypraea and selected View More. I clicked the tenth page and got the whale shark. There is no eleventh page so I thought the issue might have been because it was the last page but I can’t replicate it with any other searches (although I didn’t try and find any with exactly 10 pages). I know there’s 2 other taxa that I left ungrafted for the time being and I can search the above link to find them, so this doesn’t stop me from getting the results I wanted but it still seemed like a bug. Neither of the ungrafted taxa (this and this) are on any of the other 9 pages but I don’t have any trouble navigating to them any other way.

Search:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=cypraea
Page 9:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?page=9&q=cypraea
Page 11:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?page=11&q=cypraea
Page 10:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?page=10&q=cypraea


Clicking next from page 9 gives the same thing (it goes to the same URL so that makes sense, but sometimes those things are weird).

Might be related to:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-generates-taxon-results-but-they-point-to-null/4757
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/fail-whale-on-search-for-a-name/1909/18

Using Chrome on a Mac.

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probably this: https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=Cypraea%20hammondae%20dampierensis
a variant: https://www.inaturalist.org/search?page=6&q=hammondae

you can find similar taxa, i think, by excluding the rank parameter from the url when you use jwidness’s tool (https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_Ungrafted_taxa.html?is_active=true&parent_id=0&per_page=200) and looking for taxa with no id.

Aha that would make sense. It doesn’t really seem to exist. It shows up in the search but comes up as null if selected. Definitely the same issue as those other bugs I linked to. I can’t make it the input of a swap. I can’t add an observation with that as the ID.

Should this get merged onto one of those other topics?

i think so. it will probably help to see everything all in one place.

i think this has been fixed, or at least worked around. i can see there are still taxa records with no id (ex. Cypraea hammondae dampierensis): http://api.inaturalist.org/v1/taxa?is_active=true&parent_id=0&per_page=500. but searching for such records will now return “no results found” instead of a fail whale. this might be the code that killed the whale (shark): https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAPI/commit/86f2385b417a1144db02c397b27ff75284d7c46e.

Yes looks like the initial problem I had was fixed, but the taxon is still uneditable.

i don’t know what the taxon editing screens look like, but can you just (re)create that taxon?

Well yeah I don’t need it for anything and it’s a taxon inquirendum with no observations so it could probably just be “deleted”. But I can’t flag it for deletion or swap it into the correct genus. It’s more just my desire to tie off loose ends. :)

i guess what i meant is maybe it would be possible to create it (so that it would get an id), and then “delete” it immediately after, thereby making it go away. again, i’ve never seen what all those taxon editing options look like. so i’m not sure if what i’m suggesting even makes sense…

I tried creating one and then there were just two. It’s weird though that the null one isn’t in italics. I’m not sure what rank it is and I don’t know what would happen if you tried to create one with the same exact rank too.