#IdentiFriday is the happiest day of the week

Those nearly identical photos by different students certainly feel like duplicates to us identifiers! But of course they’re not. And each student probably values his or her own. Sigh. At least the identification goes fast after the first one is identified.

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Uncomfortable because
different workflows
and I realised we were talking at cross purposes.
But I thought …
I’ve tried to make it tidier for all 3 sides.

I’ve been scolded for identifying duplicates. Some believe they should stay unknown.

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Me too. But if they stay in the “unknowns”, everyone coming through afterwards will have to click through them and decide themselves whether to ID it, compounding the problem. I totally see how it would be annoying for identifiers of a particular group too, seeing several observations of the same organism to ID. I think the ‘life’ ID would help in those situations, do you? I’m not sure of the most effective way to deal with them.

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Guilty!
That is why I am now doing Life and Quality good as can be.

I also Unfollow those.
Almost never get a response from the observer.

Sadder about the multiples, where good photos of interesting biodiversity often lurk.

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Plants are a hot topic this week https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/where-are-all-the-plant-lovers/34140

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Unfortunately I really suck at plants… To few legs :yum:

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I’ve grown plenty of leggy plants … Would you like to review some of my spiders? I have 98 needs ID, mostly New Mexico and a few in France, Oaxaca, and other states.

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Working on them… at least a few.

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Trying… but I am actually only good in certain north american species

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swamps also have shorter and more rounded ears than cottontails (comparatively); but again can be hard to tell in photos depending on the ear view.

Their more yellowish ring around the eye is probably thanks to wideband gene I suspect - have not looked that up - but their overall coat colour as well tends to be more yellow-orangish in the white bands of the agouti pattern than cottontail (hence why they tend to be a bit darker; because the typically white band on the hair shaft is also yellowy-orange); and that is the only gene I’m aware of in rabbits that causes such a color cast to even the white areas of the agouti coloration pattern that both swamp and cottontail have. The amount of orange we still say in the rabbit world “modifying genes” because they really aren’t elucidated yet. The variance in “how much orange” is still huge. Check out https://www.gbfarm.org/rabbit/holland-colors-wideband.shtml look at the orange (not wideband) vs red (wideband) to see how the orange pulls into the eyebands and other typically agouti-white-locations, but the belly photos on two of the reds show just how variable it is!

I kinda wish there was a complex for it tbh; the color cast and ear roundness can both be easily warped by the photograph - color temp, time of day taken, angle taken. not that you can’t tell in a photograph, but also without notes or something, typically I find it hard to be certain on due to those things. Some are obvious, but many photos could be swayed either way. I tend to look at location too.

(I raised rabbits for 20 years and was pretty known for coat color genetics and determining the funky stuff that popped up :) )

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I generally don’t look at ear shape because they can move them so much that it’s not really reliable. Besides the orange ring around the eyes, I have noticed swamp rabbits have more black fur on their back. I have also noticed their heads look more block shaped whereas the eastern cottontail has a more triangular shape. Habitat is a good indicator too. I usually consider everything together to help me decide which species.

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Same! A good photo is usually ID’able. I don’t look at ears alone - but they are helpful. There is variance in the eye banding in both species too, so I don’t find any one thing good enough personally, agreed it is all taken together.

But rabbits tend to be photographed so often - and so poorly - that’s why I kinda wish there was a complex option to narrow it to the one of two species here.

I actually would like this one to be the species default photo for swamp rabbit…but if you just changed that all around I don’t want to undo stuff. Love that it shows the habitat too https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/77565196

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Work is slow today so I’m jumping on the #IdentiFriday bandwagon! One question: I’ve seen a few folks mention a Discord channel with some coordination or additional iNat chat. Anyone have an invite link?

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I changed it recently because the thumbnail was the same photo for the swamp rabbit species and cottontail genus. I’m not partial to the replacement photo for the swamp rabbit. I can change it again. The photo you linked might not be good for the thumbnail, but I can put it in the first 5.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-inat-unofficial-discord-server/3707

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unofficial-inat-discord-server/904

Maybe here?

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Should have thought to search the forum, thanks!

Inspired by the request of Eliott that made me realize I am missing so much input for US-american spiders, I spent IdentiFriday solely on US-american spiders today :-)

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Last admin comment about duplicates is this:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/an-abundance-of-duplicate-observation-flags/32582/15

So yeah, “fail upward” for now is how I’ve been rolling.

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Relatedly, as I’ve been annotating the “Lepidoptera” level from the oldest end, it’s so cool to see nowadays that on Fridays, there’s a sudden new influx of Lepidoptera records to annotate right on my first page. ;)

(Don’t worry if your id workflow makes it hard to annotate the leps, in other words- I have your back for now.)

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