For observations with both the mother and babies.. (insects & arachnids)

[mybugphotos]

I have a few observations which show a mother spider and her newly hatched babies in the same image. Would it be best to duplicate the observation for the mother to be identified in one and the babies in the other? How do most people go about this?

[sedgequeen]

You can post the observation twice, once for the adult and once for the babies, and annotate each one to the appropriate Live Stage. Also, there’s a project about observations with multiple life stages. You can add the obervation(s) to that, too.

[cthawley]

You can duplicate the observation if you wish in the fashion above, but there’s no requirement to.

[sedgequeen]

Good point.

[IDfanatic]

There are probably a few good observation fields for this, too, if you don’t want to duplicate. (Such as those for more than one sex) I.. just don’t know them right now..

[ncb1221]

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/multiple-life-stages

That project is used pretty frequently now. There’s 8790 observations in there as I’m posting this. A good way to organize these observations until there’s an official way to do this

[tiwane]

@mybugphotos

Would it be best to duplicate the observation for the mother to be identified in one and the babies in the other? How do most people go about this?

Yes, I did this for a recent photo I took of an adult albatross and its egg: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/332684915 and https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/332684914 I duplicated the observation in the web uploader page. Select a card on that page and then click on the large Duplicate button at the top of the page to duplicate it.

[lizaeckardt]

This might be an overly simplified solution, but could an additional Life Stage annotation option be added (request)? Then it would still be one observation, but indicate two life stages present.

This could be a solution for when male and female are in the same image by adding another Sex annotation.

[AdamWargon]

Liza,

If you read through the 900 replies in the annotations post:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/

You might come to the conclusion in this post:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/thank-you-for-embracing-the-gray-in-inaturalist/

@AdamWargon

Many times you might read a feature request, and you might think, “That’s obviously a good idea. I will immediately vote for that!”

Then you read the extensive counter-arguments in the post, and you realize that it’s a gray area. There are many great reasons to NOT implement that feature request. It’s not black-and-white. It’s gray!

(Sorry about all the emojis in that post. I love people, and emojis are usually a way to engage readers, but since I wrote that post, I learned that many people on the iNat Forum hate emojis, so I try not to use them anymore.)

[lizaeckardt]

I had read through a good portion of that post about a week ago. Sometimes ideas are worth revisiting. It’s been over a year since the conclusion post so I tossed it out for the group.

[cthawley]

As the annotations thread goes into, iNat observations are for a specific individual organism. As such, annotation functionality that would be designed to designate two different individuals in the same observation wouldn’t be implemented, as that would break the functional definition of an observation.

[eaneubauer]

I simply use both organism and egg annotations for females with egg sacs. This doesn’t help with spiderlings though. In that case I hope one will run off during handling and then do a full array of images of it alone. It later has an opportunity to rejoin the mother or not as it sees fit. Generally the spiderlings on the mother are head down with their butts up which isn’t ideal.