Besides working on my usual repertoire of taxa as the observations arrived, there were a couple things that stood out, this week.
First, another active identifier must have deleted their account, resulting in a batch of about 30 observations of one taxa I follow showing up as “Needs ID”, when their remaining IDs were several months old. I was perfectly happy to ID these, but it would be nice if some comment remained with these observations, to the effect of “Deleted ID from Deleted Account”, so that I could rule out the other possibility, that I was not finding these observations because of a bug in the software, when I filter for them several times a day.
I also spent time checking some of the Phylogenetic Projects for ‘unknown’ observations for familiar taxa. In one of those, an observation I came across sent me down another rabbit hole. A beetle from Honduras with a striking pattern of white (or maybe silver) dots on a black elytra. The initial ID called it a Leaf Beetle (Family Chrysomelidae). I thought that I could surely find a match among one of the species in this family, but scanning through all of the thumbnail icon photos for this family (and for Coccinellidae) for all of Central America failed to turn up anything. I’m sure there’s just something I don’t know, like a species having a different color morph that’s not reflected in the icon photo, but there’s still the tantalizing thought that this could be a species not reported on iNat before. For now, I’ve just followed the observation and saved a bookmark, in case I have some further inspiration.
As for the last rabbit hole I went down in November, that observation came from a casual observer who hasn’t been active since I made my ID. I tagged the top IDer for the taxon (who indicates an appropriate interest in the group and who’s a curator) but he also hasn’t been active, except for one day last month. And I’m guessing he never saw the notification for my tag. Patience. I need to show more patience!