I’ve been marking life stages of Lepidtoptera during the past few months. It’s been interesting. Recently went through the posted Dargida procinctus collection and notice that there are a large number of pupae with that suggested ID. Yesterday I moved the pupae I recognized as Sphinx pupae. Many if not most of the IDs of the remaining pupae are made without any further comments. I can’t believe that these are all Dargida procinctus. Owlet pupae tend to look very similar. It seems to me that AI is suggesting this specific ID for a lot of pupae which is why so many end up as D. procinctus. Should the pupae just be left with the suggested ID or moved to, say, Owlet Moths and Allies?
If you want to give an ID, you should give the lowest level ID in which you are confident, in this case, Noctuidae. You can either give that as a disagreeing ID (bumping the community ID up to family) or as a non-disagreeing ID (leaving the community ID at species). Either way, you should explain why you are giving your ID. A simple, copy-and-pasted explanation will work.
This is a common problem for many taxa with hard to ID life stages, where the CV will suggest an ID that could be correct, but is impossible to confirm because of similar looking species. It’s an unending task correct them, but hopefully in the future the CV will get better.
I see it a lot with caterpillars, where the CV suggests just one species, possibly because it’s got a lot of Research Grade photos of that caterpillar, but there are many other species that look essentially identical.
It seems to me that AI is suggesting this specific ID for a lot of pupae which is why so many end up as D. procinctus.
Yes, this is exactly what is happening. As someone who IDs Lepidoptera, I have also noticed widespread misidentifications of the generic looking, brown, moth pupae. At some point or another, by chance, Dargida procinctus must have been suggested by the CV, unwitting users selected it without thinking twice, and now we have a big misidentification problem that feeds into itself. Dargida procinctus, along with a handful of other random moth species, have now become garbage bins for all these generic, brown pupae.
Should the pupae just be left with the suggested ID or moved to, say, Owlet Moths and Allies?
Please, if you have the time, try to move them out. The only way to combat the CV is to keep bumping the misidentifications up to a higher level. In most cases, there really is no way to identify moth pupae past the family level except for some large, and morphologically distinct species like Sphingidae and Saturniidae. A lot of times I just keep it simple and go all the way back to Lepidoptera.
Thanks for the suggestions about what to do about these pupae. I’ll be doing some of these changes along with all the side-tracking into other areas that I have been doing lately. :)
Not only the CV is causing misidentifications. In Spanish hairy, probably stinging moth caterpillars are generally called azotator, gata peluda, quemador etc. If you search the internet with these names (expecially in Spanish speaking countries) you find wikipedia entries, newspaper articles and various fotos from Mexico to South America that “link” these common names to a certain scientific name (Hylesia nigricans) However, this moth seems to be restricted to certain parts of South America. In the past, there were quite a lot of misidentified caterpillars from Mexico and Central America on iNat. Besides me, some others “clean” these observations regularly. I’m not a very skilled caterpillar identifier, but I have the feeling that even in South America, especially in the North Western part, most of the Hylesia nigricans observations are misidentified, but I’m lacking the experience to correct them.