Okay, status update:
I’ve done 20 of the 35 pages now. I’ll probably do the last 15 tomorrow and then most of the things I can ID will have been ID’d.
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Even if you can’t necessarily help with an ID, you can almost certainly help with annotations.
If IDs can take a long time to occur, then thorough annotations for observations can very often essentially be said to effectively never occur. Does an observation have pictures of relevant flowers in it? Is the evidence of the creature in the observation the creature itself or something else such as a bird’s feather? Is the butterfly an adult? All questions that annotations can help to answer and they really help people to filter observations.
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A lot of these would be massively reduced if the initial ID didn’t carry any weight and it’s demoted to a “I think it’s this” and not something that takes 3 or 5 IDs to override.
The best example for that, at least for me, are these almost 3000 pages of Pterygota:
The majority of those have two IDs where someone has already said “It’s not that, it’s this” … but they end up in Pterygota and very few ID’ers venture or know how to find these. I went through about 100 the other day, helping push “beetles” to True Bugs, and it’s surprising how fast they get ID after that.
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I’m not sure if this is the thread where I saw it, as I don’t see the link here, but does anyone know where to find the summary of your last year? I remember the page had the amount of IDs I had put down, and stats about the user that got the most of my IDs etc?
I think it may have been Diana Studer who posted it but, again, I don’t see it.
There are the year-wise stats, for example https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2025/shreedave, just replace my name with yours. But of course, they are year-wise, so you can’t get the summary of your last few years in one go.
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Thank you, I’ll correct the previous post.
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This, but for spiders, is the same rationale I’m suffering from. It sure as hell isn’t enthusiasm for identifying that has me checking my ID queues multiple times a day during this time of year, when iNat get absolutely slammed with observations.
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Is it possible to mentor ‘spider’ people to help you with the easier part ? I would like taxon specialists to be able to concentrate on the good stuff, the interesting, the unusual, tagging these ones as a potential new sp …
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Also iNat’s stats in general
Unfortunately, arthropods in general tend to be tough places for identifiers to start off, due to the sheer number of family/genera/species involved, the high number of superficial lookalikes (even across different families), the frequent need for details not captured in the average iNat observation, and the high frequency of observations with incredibly poor photo quality. The CV only further complicates the issue by introducing overly specific initial IDs that fledgling identifiers may not feel comfortable disputing.
Also, much of the publicly available identification information (if it even exists for a given part of the world or a given taxon - the US/Canada tends to be luckier than other parts of the world due to the existence of sites like BugGuide) tends to require having narrowed things down to the correct family or genus first, which is a separate skillset from IDing to species within a family or genus. Any helpful rules of thumb for higher-level sorting often have weird exceptions. The guides that do exist can be dauntingly long (for instance, this guide covers just identification of North American orb weaver species and only in the context of ventral-only views, and is quite lengthy, and doesn’t exhaustively cover all species).
Mentoring/training and/or creating new identification guides is also a time-intensive activity, and I can barely muster the motivation to go onto iNat as it is.
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I hear you on that. I wound up making a quick “get to family/subfamily” guide for eastern US/Canada caterpillars to try and help with similar issues in my chunk of the arthropod Needs IDs. It did take a while, but I find drawing mostly relaxing, and I put a couple of the weird exceptions in there so people would know they exist. I think at least a few folks started using it, and if nothing else, it makes a one-size-fits-all copy-paste for a lot of ID explanations
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Okay. Spiders. We have a project. Ignore number 2, the other identifiers ARE mostly spider specialists - hrodulf wesselpretorius cecileroux wynand_uys razorspider spidermandan ajott … as you see from chosen user names and thumbnails.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/spiders-of-cape-town?tab=identifiers
and I - am neither a scientist, nor a spider specialist. But THE most observed spider on our list is easy to recognise eye candy. Starting from this obs, I was tired on the uphill, told my group to go ahead while I rested, catch you up later. Had time to observe this web and spider.
Trichonephila August 2024 - the new African Genus has brushes on the legs - making a ‘blurred black spider on web’ possible to ID.
And then. I can work thru a few more blindingly obvious ones. Then I could go thru the project and retrieve that batch, leaving your actual spider people to work thru the more appealing chunk. We make progress. And we have a team of taxon specialists at work. 300 sp and 1K identifiers ;~)
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Bugbaer, this is such a great insight into the way your mind is working when you look at a caterpillar. Making such a guide is such a hard thing to do. I hope people are inspired to use it, see what you’re getting at, and start to recognise some caterpillars themselves. I salute you!!
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Can you send or give the unlisted threads so I can read them?
Thanks! All the caterpillar guides/keys I’ve seen either implicitly assume you know what family something is (here are hundreds of awesome photos, arranged by family) or prioritize the traits that narrow the options down as quickly as possible, even if that means looking at a lot of tiny body parts under a dissecting scope. Which makes sense when writing a dichotomous key is such a huge undertaking, but isn’t going to work for ~99% of iNaturalist caterpillar photos. So I went for “what is the most obvious thing people will notice about a caterpillar?” and worked from there.
And as always with ID, I keep learning… I need to update it with the other common geometrid/inchworm caterpillar that I’ve learned also has 2.5 pairs of prolegs
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The thread was hidden (my fault) because it was felt to be calling out particular users, which is against forum guidelines; the content has been or will be deleted. Helping users to access the unlisted thread would likely also be against forum guidelines.
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Similar in content to the (permitted) discussion here. But we are not allowed to link to observers. Which is why my opening post was ‘read between the lines’. Fill in the gaps from your own iNat experience.
Amen to that. I use five different resources to identify Central and South American moths and even with all of those, I often end up trying to interpret a 150-year old hand drawings that were color printed with misaligned colors in order to find the species. Then there are the times when two resources list the same species but with impossibly different photos or drawings. And don’t even start with each resource treating families, subfamilies, tribes and subtribes differently.
It does make wading into “identifying” moths from someone’s photos a bit intimidating.
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Arthropods are toucher to ID, but they are more popular than plants (at least were I live) and tend to be ID more quickly…
If you are willing to learn at least how to recognize some common genera or a few easy species of plants in your area that really helps a lot !! Of course it’s easier when keys/ guides are easily available, but once you are more aware of the kind of species you can find, you can start looking for more distinctive traits to ID species less familiar, ect… (sorry idk if I’m too clear).
It would be great to have more identifiers in “tricky” areas. But for plants there is a lot to be done even in well-covered and not too diverse areas ! And in most of the Northern hemisphere, it’s easier in to have a class > family > genus > species approach to learn for a lot of species, compared to arthropods.
(EDIT : not speaking for fern, mosses or algae, those are tough. I just wanted to support Diana as there is a lot of help needed in Dicots/ Monocots that is beginner friendly !)
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