Right now it’s impossible to add larva and pupa life stages to taxa above order level in Insects, like this observation:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/321647191
Why not change this?
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[just noting that I moved this to general]
this is because not all insect orders have those life stages, eg any hemimetabolous insects don’t have a pupal stage. So if the current ID is above order, it makes sense to me to not allow those annotations yet
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Yeah, but it’s often easier to tell if something is a larva or pupa than to ID it to order…
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This is just one gap in the fairly simplistic iNaturalist data entry screen. Other important aspects of insect recording that are missing are quantity and sex.
If the data is not available (not collected or not relevant) then “not recorded” would be the relevant entry.
Many other wildlife recording systems manage to capture a wide range of data. Time for iNat to up its game.
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Regarding quantity, groupings and their behaviors can be documented and cross referenced but the observation data is technically inteded for single subjects.
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It’s fairly easy to extend inat using observation fields or an ancillary database to accommodate this type of data. Positive reporting and timed studies are more difficult but probably achievable… the upside being that the observational platform (iNat) becomes pluggable and would mainly be used for photography, taxonomy and team management.
Sometimes I wonder if other wildlife recording systems realize they should be plugging inat into their flows such that they benefit from inat observational data when they then use their systems to add their own scientific rigor to it.
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you can create a specific project with special tags? haha
I’ve thought the same thing when doing IDs from the “unknown” pile. There’ve been times I’ve wanted to add that extra bit of information in case it’s useful for an IDer who might want to sort on that stage.
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Adding Endopterygota would be the best solution, but that still seems to be a long way off: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-taxon-for-holometabolous-insects/7191
This reminds me of a thing I’ve been thinking of about the difference between insects with nymph instars instead of larval instars (and subimagos for a select few). If only iNaturalist could account for both in some way before a person IDs to the order or something more refined because a broader “immature” option could eventually translate into either the nymph, larva, or subimago value when the insect is further identified (although that would not be the originally proposed value, and some users might disagree with the changes).
I’m also a little miffed that certain parasitic Diptera like a few species of botfly do not have a larva option in the annotations. The larval stage does exist and can be observed by removing them from the cavity in their host and taking a photo of the results, so there’s no reason for it to not exist. I can’t find a specific taxon right now, but I know this issue has persisted for a few parasite flies.
Other important aspects of insect recording that are missing are quantity and sex.
Annotations for sex are available on the web version of iNaturalist once the observation is uploaded. Most insects have one sex, and this is easy to assign if you know how to sex the species observed. Quantity, on the other hand, is reserved for observation fields. Some projects include a quantity field with some being fuzzy value (a range rather than an exact integer) and other requiring those exact integers, and I think if you type in “quantity” into the observation field addition textbox on the web version they appear automatically.
Regarding quantity, groupings and their behaviors can be documented and cross referenced but the observation data is technically inteded for single subjects.
This would be impossible for mating pairs and vast groups of the same organism (e.g. aphid gatherings and huge bird colonies), and unless there are multiple species in the same observation best practice involves not marking against “Evidence related to a single subject” in the DQA; rather, a person can just add the quantity using some observation field, add the observation to a multiple life stages or multiple sexes project, etc.
Adding Endopterygota would be the best solution, but that still seems to be a long way off: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-taxon-for-holometabolous-insects/7191
If only it was a viable taxon recognized by iNaturalist. I’m just concerned that since it hasn’t been added yet it’s because the entomology community expects there to be some huge issue in the near future where they discover the group is paraphyletic, contains taxa that have a life cycle involcing something more similar to nymph stages, etc.
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It’s worth noting e.g. the leafmine annotation currently applies to “Insecta except [long list of orders which are not known to form leafmines]". Whereas the pupa annotation applies to “[long list of orders which have a pupal stage]”. Seems like if they defined the life stage annotations exclusionarily (e.g. to Pterygota except [list of orders which don’t have a pupal stage]) this would work.
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the reason Endopterygota hasn’t been added to iNaturalist’s taxonomy doesn’t have to do with whether it’s actually a well-supported clade or would be useful for ID purposes (it is and it would be): it’s because any change to the ancestry of a taxon affects all observations of that taxon, and the more observations there are of a taxon, the more strain it puts on the site when it’s moved—and holometabolous insects represent nearly 1/5 of all observations on iNaturalist. by the time the issue of adding Endopterygota was first raised in this flag about 6 years ago, the number of observations of the relevant orders was already getting prohibitively high (over 5 million), and by mid-2021 it had more than doubled (to over 12 million), prompting loarie to close the flag, pending hypothetical future infrastructure changes or increases in the efficiency of ancestry changes that would allow such observation-rich taxa to be moved without breaking the site. the number of iNat observations has exploded since then; moving to the present, each of the “big four” holometabolous insect orders now has more observations than all of them combined did when that flag was raised (with Lepidoptera alone now having well over twice as many observations as all insects did when the flag was closed), and there are now nearly 60 million observations of holometabolous insects as a whole, far too many for the requested ancestry changes to be made at this point (short of fundamental changes to how those changes would affect downstream observations, and/or a very long period of downtime). (holometabolous insects aren’t the only long-requested higher taxon that’s unlikely to be added anytime soon due to infrastructure concerns; among other examples, proposed changes around the base of flowering plants similarly affect too many observations to be particularly feasible at this point, unfortunately.)
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The biggest question I have now is “what isn’t too much of a strain on iNaturalist’s back-end?” Almost everything I feel would be a good improvement, other than the continuous flagging of smaller taxa that get changed with splits and merges, would require significant changes. I hope the annotation issue here can somehow be resolved.
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When do you know what the organism is? I should expect that you can only add life stages when the observation is Research Grade. I remember bugs when an observation changes from order and the annotation got stuck.
I updated the title wording from “tags” to “annotations” since this is what the thread seems to be discussing.
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I haven’t heard it from anybody yet, but I think it is reasonable to expect that IDers with an interest in larvae can select observations marked as larva and ID them. This does not even require specialist knowledge – the places where prolegs are located allows to separate sawflies from lepidoptera and recognize owlets and geometers inside the latter. So it does make sense to be able to annotate the lifestage as early as reasonably possible.
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There is an attempt of a workaround for the problem: There is at least one project (by me, there are probably others and their creators don’t know about each other – I’d love to see them merged (both the observations and the people)) that larvae can be added to. Unfortunately the search for projects doesn’t seem to work properly (see appended image).
My project is https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/larvae-of-endopterygota, another one seems to be https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/insect-larvae which I only found recently.
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Those projects are cool. Is there an umbrella project containing it and another project for a nymphs from non-endopterygota insects?
(minor note re: that project’s description—in addition to 47208, 47157, 47822, 47201, 62164, 49369, 48763, and 83202, Endopterygota would also include 47794 [Raphidioptera], 47864 [Megaloptera], and 83204 [Siphonaptera])
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I agree that the project search function is largely useless for many search needs. I would love to see both better keyword searching and options to filter by taxon and region (for projects that have these parameters set).
Given that your much newer project only has a few hundred observations and the other one has over 18 thousand, you could consider whether you want to simply add all the observations from your project to the other one and delete yours. The other project is slightly different in scope since it includes galls, but it seems like it is similar enough that it might make sense to just focus efforts on the one with more observations.
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