I’ve added a few insects to the scattershot list of taxa I identify, which has allowed me to keep up my pace of identifications despite the observation season winding down for many of these. And after practicing with the keyboard shortcuts on the Identify page, I must say that they’re a lot more efficient that using the mouse. There were two particular highlights to my week:
I came across an interesting interaction in one observation that I thought was worthy of being an Observation of the Day. Hopefully, it was appear on iNat’s social media accounts, soon. (Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that @seastarya is the new staffer in charge of selecting these OOTDs. All suggestions can be sent her way.)
While reviewing Arisaema, I saw one observation where I was confident enough to enter a maverick ID, where three contrary IDs had already been entered. That was a milestone of sorts for this amateur. One of the other IDs has since been deleted, so we’re back to three “leading” IDs.
Back to correcting Eastern Cottontail vs Swamp Rabbit again today. Earlier this year I was looking through RG Eastern Cottontails for Swamp Rabbits. Now I’m looking through RG Swamp Rabbits for Eastern Cottontails. There are a lot less of these. Mostly Eastern Cottontails that have a lot more red in their coat and an eye ring that is not pure white.
Species count 2219 for the winner Coffs Harbour (wish the project names included the country - Australia - NSW between Brisbane and Sydney). Good to see a new location each year. Cape Town coming in second ahead of Melbourne.
39% RG for the umbrella.
For Southern Africa 10.5K sp at 33% RG
Cape Town 44% RG
Coffs Harbour identifiers working hard at 56% RG !!
That does take some guts, chapeau! Great that you extented your IDer repertoire as well.
I am still absolutely consumed by Tigrosa, with some detours to other lycosidae to keep it interesting. I am now at about 17.000 Tigrosa needs ID waiting for me (down from 30.000 back in march) and have about 19.000 Tigrosa IDs done at the moment… so yeah, that is some milestone passed to have more done than waiting now.
Yesterday however I dove into family level needs ID, which was super fun digging up a lot of very old observations (between 8 and 11 years) and sending them to RG with the help of my favourite IDer companion .. what a satisfing task, getting those oldies straight to species level. I think I will do some more of those now..
With a few exceptions, my IDs have been taxa that I’m familiar with from my local area. When using the Explore interface, I used a bounding box to limit the observations to the eastern half of North America. When I switched to using the Identify page, I expanded the search location to all of the United States and Canada. After learning to ID some milkweed bugs (and finding an outstanding key to these species), this week I tried expanding my search to Mexico. This led to some rarer observations of species not found further north. Now, I understand the guideline not to agree to IDs unless I can independently confirm them. But what if the first IDer wrote the key? Is that truly an independent confirmation?
Watching Thursday’s Zoom seminar on IDs, I knew that the material was more elementary than I needed. Yet, just by watching Tony work through some examples, I still learned something. Using the Identify interface, it seemed to me that the Suggestion tab would never return any useful suggestions. Somehow, I never noticed that the Source, Taxon, and Place listed at the top of that were pick lists that actually give me much more control over the CV suggestions than what is returned through the Explore page. I feel like a licensed driver suddenly asking the question, ‘‘what does that lever to the left of the steering wheel do?”
As an example of the idea of “passing the baton” that was mentioned in that seminar, there’s one observation I helped ID Thursday morning. I could only recognize it as a jelly of unusual size. Withing a few minutes of my adding a class ID, it had a specific name and an awesome common name: the Pink Meanie.
Everyone’s knowledge is ultimately derived at least in part from someone else’s. You still have to decide whether the key is reliable and how to interpret the photos/evidence. If you are not agreeing merely because you trust the person’s expertise, but are examining the evidence yourself and assessing it and making your own conclusions about what species it is and why, you are making an independent ID.
The power of getting an observation in frotn of the right set of eyes
This week I strayed a bit from Tigrosa, but not too far.. I went down some Hogna antelucana (often confused with Tigrosa) and Gladicosa rabbit hole and today I found yet another one when poking a bit into Hogna frondicola.. lot’s of corrections to make, But for the rest of my evening I’ll stick with sending some familiy level lycosidae to species or at least genus if I can
Dear Observer,
If you take a photo of a clearly IDable plant next to an unclassifiable pile of poop without any guidance about what the target of the photo is, don’t be surprised when it sits in Limbo for three months. Don’t be annoyed when someone finally comes along, IDs the plant to species, and declares that they (me) have no idea about the poop.
Yes, scats can be useful tools to tell what’s in the area, but only when they have sufficient detail to indicate at least what order of critter it came from. Otherwise, it’s just a pile of poop, and this is not the website for that.
[/rant]
Thank you for your forbearance. At least I have a ready antidote: the half-starved, orphaned baby tortoiseshell kitten who wandered into our yard has flourished on a steady diet of kitten formula and human affection, and is just about ready to go to foster.
This weekend I got sidetracked quite a bit from my Tigrosa quest..
I went back to India and Asia and got sucked back into those beautyful web building lycosids Hippasa, that need quite a bit of work… I dug deep into it and ran into some interesting observations that still need a final resolution, but at least they are not in the wrong species pool anymore…
I am on a forced break that sent me back to north american lycosids now, as I need to wait for a species being added, so I can ID it
It’s taken me three years of identifying on and off during the off-season, but I finally caught up on Hylodesmum species of the US and Canada and I’m finally in maintenance mode! There’s only three species north of Mexico, but many observations are are exclusively a closeup of a flower- and of course the leaves are needed to distinguish them. The CV wasn’t particularly helpful when I got started, and misidentifications were pretty rampant even when the proper leaf characters were present. However! Partway through my friend figured out that the flowers (and fruits!) are actually super distinct among the three, so once we got that hammered out it was smooth sailing. I corrected or confirmed 17,499 observations of the 23,748 in the region, and right now about 89% of the 23k are RG. So that’s pretty neat!
I’m sure more observations will keep trickling in this winter, especially as users catch up on upload backlogs and identifiers (including myself) comb through similar genera like Desmodium and broader family/tribe/etc IDs. But it’s really great to finally be caught up on something- at least for now!
I know it is not Identify Friday but… I just got done reviewing all non research grade obs at subphylum and above in my county next step state? Probably not, I’ll probably see if I can push past subphylum at all.
When I started (a while back) there were over 100 pages for me to go through. While I wasn’t able to help a lot of them I was able to annotate and move some down to IDs.
Special shoutout to @PeaKayTea and @Egordon88 Y’all do a lot of ID work.
.. what a satisfing task, getting those oldies straight to species level. I think I will do some more of those now..
