'iNaturalist' is marking my wild caterpillar observations as captive

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Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241675923
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241686404

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Today I uploaded two development series of caterpillars reared from wild larvae to adulthood. The initial observation in the series is the wild larva. I marked all consecutive observations as captive. When I looked back at the observations after a bit of time, I saw that both of the initial wild observations for two separate individual caterpillars had been marked as captive by ‘iNaturalist’ and were thus downgraded to casual. But they were not captive at this time. When I tried to ask and tag the user and click on the tag, it said that user has been suspended. See both URL’s above. They are now research grade because I voted them as wild in the DQA, but they would have remained casual if I hadn’t revisited the observations. Why is ‘iNaturalist’ marking these as captive?

Thank you!

1 Like

heads up this is not a bug

3 Likes

Ah, so because there are say 20 observations of Catocala clintonii marked as captive from 3 different development series, and there are not many wild observations currently in the county, the site is automatically marking them as captive. More wild observations would help fix this issue, but until then I need to go back and countervote. Correct? Thanks! @thebeachcomber that’s very helpful.

8 Likes

yes, that’s all correct

1 Like