There are some disagreements over what constitutes orders, but for the sake of simplicity lets just say its every taxon depicted in this tree.
What long would it take a dedicated person to observe every arthropod order? Would it even be possible? Which taxa would be the most difficult?
it’s not exactly the same, but there’s a similar discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/could-one-person-observe-all-living-animal-families/35904.
There are only 51 observations of Mantophasmatodea, and by only 28 observers, mostly in South Africa. So (unless the observer lives in South Africa) that would be one of the harder orders to find.
EDIT: Siphoniulida, a monogeneric Order of millipedes, have exactly zero observations on iNat. It contains only two known extant species, one of which is known from only a single specimen, and the other from only a few. So I’m going to say this would likely be the hardest extant Arthropod order to find, and would make your quest potentially take a very long time.
I think mantophasmatodea would be a lot easier actually some of these crustacean taxa
Good point. Something like Nectiopoda, which has only three observers, is a real challenge.
Wikipedia lists about 138 extant arthropod orders. With 5 minutes per observation (for taking fotos and upload) one needs about 11.5 hours to upload 138 observations.
this is certainly a drastic simplification, as finding arthropods of all 138 orders is a in fact a whole other issue, Did you check whether or not there is somebody on iNat who already managed to observe more than 100 orders?
If you had them all in one box… IT WOULD TAKE WEEKS.
(I really don’t know the real time.)
How can I check for the number of orders someone has observed?
Seriously does anyone know this?
Life list?
I cant find the option to do it on order level.
Hmm, I can’t seem to do it either. Oh well.
filter the dynamic life list by arthropods, export the list, and then in your own tools filter the exported list by taxon rank = order (or summarize the results by rank).
if you need to do more complicated initial filtering, you can use https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_taxonomy to get results similar to those from the dynamic life list, with more options for filtering observations (in the URL).
