part 3
multi-species observations needing the DQA mark, unless the observer did fix them
(don’t forget to take off your default place if needed/desired)
Batch 1 COMPLETE
Batch 2 COMPLETE
Batch 3
Batch 4
Batch 5
Batch 6
Batch 7
Batch 8
Batch 9
Batch 10
Batch 11
Batch 12
Batch 13
Batch 14
Batch 15
Batch 16
Batch 17
Batch 18
Yes. It was all the stand-alone comments (not those embedded in IDs) that ever linked my how-to-split-an-observation tutorial (English version) between when I wrote the tutorial and the day the new DQA line came out. However Loarie made the links for me, so I don’t know how he did it. He posted them here–I was finding it too hard on my eyes so I reformatted them.
The experience really depends a lot on taxon and area of expertise. In spiders there are soooo many observations being stuck at order or even only class (arachnida… but there is some recent effort to push them further). Usually it is not too hard to get them to family or genus for people knowing something about spiders.
I am IDing in Taiwan since several weeks now and did about 5500 IDs so far… I usually start with the oldest… I still have a long way to go to the most recent observations. The youngest I have IDed now are about 4 years old (few exceptions when I saw a new one coming in I was able to put to species). I put 1700 observations to family or subfamily level, which as I said should normally not be a very hard task for any spiderIDer. About 1000 observations I was able to put to RG as it only required agreeing with an initial ID (or someone agreed with me after I put my ID… but that were not so many at species level)… Those were easy IDs I would say, so about half of the IDs I did I would count to thos “burried” observations just nobody ever had time to look at
Not many from South America, but I guess is kind to be expected
There are Spanish and Portuguese translations of the tutorial, which may have been better search terms for that part of the world.
Very interesting, thank you for the insight !
I tried to get a lot of those out of class last month, it was great to see folks like you, paolosol, and others identify them further. thanks!
Ok, 6000 something IDs later it is time for me to move on from Taiwan. I will surely come back to the still more than 38.000 needs ID Araneae, but for now I wonder what Japan is like 
I thought I never had been there (IDing of course), but was surprised to see that I already have done some 400+ IDs there… Half of them for two Argiope species I just know wherever they are… the rest was probably from my Araneae all around the world ID sessions
This depends so much on what and how I ID.
I remembered this question and timed myself Iding one page (30 observation) of a certain species… it included agreeing, adding the species identification and in two cases disagreeing and all in all it took me 2 minutes… so I could probably do 400 IDs in half an hour. As there is still almost 600 needs ID of this filter setting there, I could probably even manage to do so. But for many other IDs I will be much less efficient… for example because there are only 4 pages of a certain filter and I have to come up with a new one or I am not on species level but on a more general level that needs a) much more suggesting by me or b) a broder knowledge of species within an area and I might check back and forth with my soruces…
So the 400 in 30 minutes is probably a best case scenario :-)
Thanks for identifying my Japan spider observations!
And 1 in 30 minutes is the worst case, when you have a tricky moth and you know it’s identifiable if you look hard enough … 
When it comes to time - maybe. But those IDs are often the most satisfying ones, when you finally manage to get it right 
I have lost hours, even days for some special IDs, but I still remember these instances fondly. It is like being a detective and solving the case
Got some results on a mystery wildflower that piqued my interest when I was going through unknowns in rural SE Texas (where I live). https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/130438604 A species I’ve never heard of before and only the second obs of this species in Texas. Pentodon pentandrus
Going down those research rabbit holes trying to figure out the differences between a couple of species is one of my favourite aspects of doing some of the trickier IDs.
Sometimes I’ll end up learning about a bunch of debates about the taxonomy of a species or there’ll be identification guides where one insists they’re impossible to tell apart without seeing them from a certain angle while another claims there are several ways to tell. It really does feel like being a detective trying to solve the case
I love that part of iNaturalist, the research. Sometimes you read enough to see the progression of the taxonomy and how strange it is that one species you know well was once considered many. But sometimes, it leads to more questions than answers.
I recently had a discussion with @silversea_starsong about whether the lady beetle Hippodamia koebelei actually has spots and it’s possible historic confusion with the similar H. convergens. A strange inconsistency arose during my research. The older, American publications all pointed to this species being completely spotless but the more recent, Mexican publications all reported the common presence of spots. What’s even stranger is that all the specimens were collected in the same relative location, so how could the spotted morphs be missed for so long if they’re so common?
It’s a head-scratcher! And I don’t have an answer other than somewhere down the line, someone made a mistake. Pretty interesting nonetheless!
Oh that really is an intriguing one. I’d be fascinated to know how that discrepancy came about, especially with the two sets of publications saying seemingly opposite things.
I know I’ve seen a couple of instances of people being unable to agree whether a species is actually its own species or a subspecies of another, and I think one of my favourite examples was the confusion with Callophrys viridis, C. dumetorum, and C. sheridanii. I just wanted to know the differences between them after seeing some observations and ended up reading all about how the taxonomy of the three has changed over time because of a disagreement about the lectotype for C. dumetorum. And after all that I’m still not sure how to tell the difference between the three 
.
I appreciate that nature consistently refuses to fit into the neat little categories that humans try to make.
It got super quiet here… what are you all up to at the moment?
As Asia unexpectedly became my pet project for the year (I blame a fellow spider IDer, not on this forum, who asked me to help clean up a certain species mess and it all went downhill for me from there ) I am at the moment trying to clean up 500 pages of Araneae-needs-ID all over Asia… putting them to family or genus mainly, not loosing too much time on species IDs for now as I don’t know all lookalikes for alle regions of Asia… do some finer work later again
i was thinking the same thing the other day, but i suspected that everybody was just engaged with other things. it’s springtime in the northern hemisphere. so there’s a lot to see and do.
i still continue to do a few IDs every few days or so, when there’s time, but i still have a 6-month backlog of observations to input at some point, too, among other non-iNat stuff.
I wanted to clear African Unknowns ahead of CNC.
Not a hope. But I can try to keep the total steady against what is newly uploaded. I peel off a page from the top and the bottom, the recently observed then the recently uploaded old obs.
This one is fascinating and beautiful, but weird
Update - first obs of a new sp !!
I went traveling for 2 weeks (home soon!) and making IDs on my phone is annoying. But I am actually looking forward to identifying again!