A recent discussion on iNat brought up the question of what category immature organisms should be placed in when annotating observations. For birds, Juvenile typically refers to birds with their first set of true feathers (not their natal down) that they grow in the nest or shortly after hatching, for precocial species. Adult refers to their final set of plumages, which they will have for the rest of their life. Some species have 1 or more in-between set of plumages, and it’s these that I’m unsure how to annotate.
I couldn’t find any definitions for Adult and Juvenile in the iNat help pages, and it seems like there are no plans to add an Immature annotation for birds. Should all individuals that are not in full adult plumage be annotated as Juvenile? Or should birds with in-between plumages be annotated as Adult?
On iNat, “juvenile” is used to indicate anything that is not an adult. I really wish iNat would change the term “juvenile” to “immature” for birds. As you said, “juvenile” is a term that elsewhere is used for a very specific plumage stage in birds, while immature is an all encompassing term for any non-adult birds, including juveniles (i.e., all juvenile birds are immature birds, but not all immature birds are juveniles).
Juvenile: a bird in its first plumage of non-downy feathers. Immature: a bird in any non-adult plumage, including (but not limited to) juvenile plumage.
No. It is better to annotate as juvenile than adult, though personally, I typically don’t annotate non-juvenile immature birds because I can’t get past the misuse of the term.
I really wish they would add an annotation for actually juvenile birds. I’ve been trying to add more age variation in taxon photos lately, and in some species this requires scrolling through pages and pages of photos of very-nearly-adults. The actual juvenile plumage is often quite different, but it’s a needle in a haystack of immatures.
I don’t disagree, but I doubt iNat would add age categories that aren’t discrete, especially since the non-juvenile immature classes includes both downy chicks and “subadults” with the juvenile class in-between.
Simply changing “juvenile” to “immature” does a few things:
Keeps the terminology meaningful to the average iNat user (doesn’t use hyper specific terminology that isn’t readily apparent to a non-bird person) while being an accurate term (unlike the way “juvenile” is currently applied).
Avoids the need to retroactively review the 700+K bird observations that currently have the “juvenile” annotation.
I’m not sure this is entirely answering your question, but many wrasse/parrotfish species for example have very distinct juvenile/natal phases, sub adult, and adult colorations. Same goes for salmon, though not to quite an extent. It still would be helpful to have some way to distinguish between fry and ocean going but still sexually immature subadults.
Is that a bad thing though? I’d be curious to here people’s thoughts on allowing different taxon to have different annotations besides the ones currently in place (maybe allow curators to add or at the very least propose to iNat staff new ones)? I primarily work with fish so there may be some conflicts with other taxon, but at least from my perspective it would be pretty helpful to provide some distinction between e.g. newly hatched salmon and ones that have been in freshwater for over a year and are just going out to sea. Likewise for distinguishing between spawning coloration adult and ocean phase ones, though that might be a little too specific.
So would the gulls. That was my point: a lot of these things can be achieved with observation fields. The annotations (as I understand them) are meant to be general and widely applicable, yet I keep seeing people wanting them to be as specific as observation fields.
Every rose has its prickle… 