# Frequency of recording the same species, is it useful?

**URL:** <https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/frequency-of-recording-the-same-species-is-it-useful/83436>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [August 5, 2026, 8:26pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/frequency-of-recording-the-same-species-is-it-useful/83436 "2026-08-05T20:26:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![AdamWargon](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forum.inaturalist.org/adamwargon/32/44649_2.png) [@AdamWargon](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/AdamWargon)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2026, 8:43pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/frequency-of-recording-the-same-species-is-it-useful/83436/4 "2026-08-05T20:43:44Z")

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This question has been discussed many times on the forum. You can find the threads in the “Related topics”, below. Here is one previous answer:

> [@Excessive observing?](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/excessive-observing/46714/2):
>
> Depends entirely on your goals. If you are doing research on morphological variation in red imported fire ant colonies throughout the US, then a photo of every ant in a hill may be warranted. JK, that type of research shouldn’t be conducted fully on iNaturalist, at least not with ant species that form thousands-strong colonies. 1), that’s a lot of data that iNaturalist now has to take care of and 2), there are certainly better image storage platforms for such projects. However, the real question should be “is this data useful to me or someone else?” If you can’t fathom why documenting every ant in an ant colony would be useful, then don’t do it. But if you are indeed documenting morphological variation in, say, twig ant colonies, and you want to make it into a citizen science project, then iNaturalist could be used for that.

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