I’ll start off by saying sorry for not focusing much on worms for the last 6-7months! You were a great help with identifying some of mine and pushed me towards finding a few new species of them. I expect to mostly find the same boring species around my town, but if I’m ever in the spot to take some half decent photos, I’ll see what I can do.
I really do think you are doing important work. I’ve been focusing almost solely on Collembola ID this year, and in conjunction with a few other key observers/identifiers, we have added a few dozen species to the CV as well as a fair number of iNat firsts. The CV is finally getting “good” (in NA at least) at recognizing springtail species, as many of them are turning out to be quite unique in habitus… and I think that’s one of the major problems with worms.
The main issues are threefold:
- To the average observer, worms are pretty gross. Even if they COULD get better pictures, they simply don’t want to, assuming they take any in the first place.
- Worms all look extraordinarily similar to the untrained eye. Even if people know that there are X number of species in their area, seeing a potentially new worm isn’t as obvious and exciting as seeing a shiny new beetle, and so they are overlooked. This is something that I’m guilty of. I’ve been poking around the lower Appalachian mountains a lot recently, but I haven’t put much thought into what I’m assuming are the same worms I see everywhere. Though I am still on the lookout for some of the especially strange species that are rarely seen in the area.
- Worms require a lot more work on the part of the observer to get an accurate ID on. If someone only has so much time to make observations, they may be inclined (even subconsciously) to focus on more “reliable” taxa, because they want to feel like they’re contributing more to the platform (achieving research grade observations). So they spend 1 minute uploading a lady bug and the flower it’s on instead of 5 minutes trying to get the right angle on a worm that might not be identifiable anyway.
Unfortunately, I don’t think these are issues that are easy to fix in the short term.
For 1, well, there will always be some people who enjoy worms. Theoretically the number of them that wind up on iNat should grow over time. So, in time, this should theoretically get solved - ideally there will be a “critical mass” of worm identifiers and eventually the CV will improve to the point that they can handle incoming observations without too much fuss.
For 2, you are doing the best thing you can here. The easier worms are to distinguish (via associating microscopy with good habitus shots and restricting these species to their actual ranges rather than “Common Earthworm” Hell) the more likely it is that people will learn some of the more general traits of different worms and want to photograph new ones. But again, this is gated by time.
For 3, the fix is again going to be time. You need to wait until the subset of worm-posters who are capable of taking photos of distinguishing features grows to the point that there are enough good photos to train the CV on. This is sort of happening on its own as camera technology in phones gets better. Give it a decade, maybe there will be enough power in the average phone camera to pick up these minute features without the observer even needing to try. And hey, maybe enough users will pick up a cheap stereo microscope or macro photography setup in the meantime.
To summarize, this is something that can only be solved with time and effort, and you are already putting a lot of that in. Eventually, enough people are going to get interested (whether that’s a few people who fall in love with it or a few dozen who decide they can spend twenty minutes a week with a worm) and the changes will start happening that much faster.
