It looks like the focus of week 2 of the iNaturalist-wide ID-a-thon is reptiles and amphibians. Great!
Except I’m lousy at IDing those, for some reason. And where I live, there aren’t that many species and there are plenty of identifiers for those taxa. Sure, I could learn something new, but I ‘m not inspired to. So I’m just going to keep on IDing mostly vascular plants - I’ll never run out of those to ID.
Is that why there were so many Tarichae torosae when I was IDing this morning? Must be the newt thing!
I can usually tell a green anole, but this morning I wasn’t quite sure. Usually I’m content to call something “squam” or “serpe” and leave it at that.
Ha!
I did find a Spotted Salamander observation to ID, plus two amphibian calls. I should filter for sounds - I bet there are some of those that still need IDs in my region.
where we can see the focus of ID-a-thon?
I am mostly IDing costal birds
It does seem a somewhat odd choice, given that those two groups are amongst the least in need of attention. Reptiles as a whole are currently at around 90% RG (with only birds being higher), and amphibians aren’t far behind at over 80%. These groups seem very well looked after, compared with, say, plants at 60% and insects at 55% (both of which have needs-id pools in the tens of millions).
Where I live, there’s a relatively tiny number of native species, with the needs-id pool made up almost entirely of introduced species (i.e. escaped/unwanted pets), plus lots and lots of hard to identify newts from a single genus. 
I think I’d prefer to invest my time in learning something where I have a much better chance of making a long-term difference.
Here is where the announcement of this week’s focus is: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/id-a-thon#sorting
Thank you very much! It is quite hidden on the site x)
My vote is on insects for Week 3.
And plants for Week 4.
The herps have been easy clicks for Africa. We have a project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/afriherps and taxon specialists who scoop them up as they come in!
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/afriherps/journal/120501-afriherps-reaches-400k-observations
I’ve been staying super on top of reptiles and amphibians for the last few weeks after these were called out in an ambassador training as a good next step for getting more into identifying….I’m going to hold off on them a bit so there’s more for others to help with besides tadpoles, eggs, egg shells, roadkill, tracks, and frog audio - which I’m pretty sure is all you’ll see on the identify page now.
I am not sure this should be the takeaway, to cut back on your typical IDing. I think it is good that you keep them in check and you should stick to it if this is what motivates you.
I was also a bit surprised by the choice.. yes, they are quite easy to sort as suggested, which is of course beginner friendly. So I kind of get why those were chosen - theoretically. However, what is the use when there are rarely any observations to get through, besides the difficult eggs or parts of molted skins, which seem to be about everything that the reptile filter brings up and the amphibians do not look much more fun. Looks like a rather frustrating experience for a new IDer and would not keep me invested for long.. it does not seem to be of much practical use.
Well I mostly hang out in global and US unknowns now. Reptiles and amphibians are just a quick daily check for me since I’ve reviewed them ALL at this point. (And also mollusks in case that’s next on the list - I moved all the snail- and slug-looking friends down to gastropods.)
Exactly. I looked through the provided links and there simply are no “easy” identifiable obs at Needs ID, only the difficult ones you mentioned above. I am surprised and disappointed iNaturalist would promote this category that doesn’t need any help.
What I don’t understand yet is how to make sure I’m not classifying a gallywasp as a salamander or a worm like an ascaris as a caecilian. If it’s in the amphibians catagory I’d be shy to bump it along without knowing how to reject the non-amphibians.
Snakes are pretty cool
I agree that a lot of reptiles and amphibian observations don’t remain at the class level very long, but some do, but I think it’s important to remember that this builds on on the “unknowns” focus last week. Perhaps some people who are identifying unknowns can now get reptiles and amphibians down past class because of this information.
This is also probably the week of the ID-a-thon where the most people are going to be busy with holiday stuff, so the focus was smaller. There will be some broader categories next week.
I would focus on the skin and seeing whether the animal has scales. If it has scales (eg you can see the hexagonal scales on the back of this randomly-chosen one), it’s not an amphibian.
From the announcement, looks like they picked it because it’s the easiest for people new to IDing to pick up.
Oh, so THAT’S why my photos of tadpoles got ID’d as frogs and toads, instead of my original thing of amphibians.
I’m sticking to working on places and things that need help or have backlogs…….although I learned a lot of lessons last week.
Some day I will understand how to differentiate between things are fungus and things that are prokaryotes (I think? or slime molds or something)…..algae are difficult too because they are in two different kingdoms.
There’s a missing lineage (Rhynchocephalia), but if you’re not identifying in NZ you can ignore it.
That page shows Sauria as just lizards, but Sauria actually includes both archosaurs and squamates. If I see a lizard and don’t know what kind it is, I ID it as Squamata, which also includes snakes, but according to cladistics, snakes are more closely related to iguanas than to geckos.
Just noting that it isn’t always safe to ID tadpoles as frogs/toads. Some salamanders have tadpoles too! In some places, there aren’t any salamanders (or any salamanders with tadpoles), so there it is a safe ID.
Just in time for when I began learning about how to spot the differences between Nilssonia nigricans and Nilssonia gangeticus! This is probably not useful because a lot of people know all the locations where N. nigricans is found in temple ponds with wild populations being elusive, and the way iNat works is that captive organisms can’t be made Research Grade no matter how perfect of a specimen they are in terms of their ability to be positively and narrowly identified.