Wanted to dig this request out again. I am interested in unterstanding if these kinds of annotations for social insects would be easy to implement and what speaks against having this feature displaying the seasonal distribution of the three adult types. @tiwane You think something like this is possible?
I’m not an expert, but I figure the taxa with eusocial members could easily be outlined: Formicidae, Apis, Bombus, Meliponini, some Crabronids and Vespids plus the unrelated Termites (Isoptera).
Especially for ants and bumblebees I would imagine these additional data quite valuable, e.g. to see which ant species swarms when during the year, or when the first worker bumblebees appear.
Just a note that the sex annotation also shows up for archaea, bacteria and viruses. This doesn’t make any sense at all, since prokaryotes can’t even reproduce sexually (don’t undergo meiosis/fertilization) like eukaryotes, and viruses certainly don’t either. In contrast, the sex annotation does NOT show up for fungi, which do undergo sexual reproduction (with mating types instead of males/females). It probably should be removed from archaea, bacteria and viruses as well since it doesn’t apply there - even less than for fungi.
Also, I’ve said it before but I’ll mention it again: It would be awesome to have an annotation for sporophyte vs. gametophyte for seedless plants sort of as a way to add phenology annotation to those (with the option to choose both, e.g. for mosses). It wouldn’t make sense to add this for seed plants since the gametophytes in that case are microscopic and unlikely to appear as observations. But then, flowering plants already have their own phenology annotations so that is covered.
And finally, since the majority of plants (>90% of flowering plants) are bisexual/hermaphrodites, it would be nice to have that as an option for sex. According to a publication by Renner & Wong in Syst.Biol. 50:700–712 , 2001, only about 6% (14,620 of 240,000) of angiosperm species are dioecious and therefore have separate male and female individuals. So right now, iNat offers an annotation for the 6% that are unusual but doesn’t apply to 94% of angiosperm species the way it is set up (you can only choose either male or female but not both).
For Birds, the options for age in birds are Juvenile, Adult, and Egg. Immature is a different stage of life than Juvenile, and I believe it should have its own section in the drop down menu. I don’t know if this has previously been brought up.
I have been working more on annotating phenology on my observation and others that I come across, and remembered that early on I noticed there wasn’t an option for leaf bud break (first leaves) or leaf drop (seasonal leaf drop).
I looked through some of the forum annotation requests and it seemed they were all related to flowering or life stage that I could see, but indicating whether plants are out of leaf or coming into leaf would be a valuable phenological note to have as climate changes and extends the leafing period of many plants that are seasonally deciduous.
One touched on leaf phenology, but wasn’t a specific request for an annotation feature. I couldn’t look thorough all of the requests however, so apologies if this has been requested before, though I would like a reference to the appropriate forums if this has already been requested and rejected.
Judging leaf break and drop (and possibly ‘in leaf’) could be a somewhat subjective annotation, though on a forum with such a large user base and levels of expertise or type of training, there will always be some level of subjectivity. Are there any reasons this would not be practical to implement?
I would most like ways to use annotations to convey something about species assemblages! Right now I put links to many separate observations of different species that were, say, all on the same branch at the same time, in the notes field of the others, but perhaps there could also be a way to use annotations to list other species “associating with” the one observed. And then it would be something actually tagged to the data, rather than something a person only discovers following links in the notes or reading a description.
I say “species” but the field would probably work best allowing for any level of taxa to be annotated as associated.
Similar data that someone studying a given observation might find useful could also be a place to start - weather data, environmental notes (ex: canopy density assessed by the observer at the site), ways to make a series of observations along transect points
Edit: other related thoughts - on some fungi, for example, there are algae that grow on them and change the appearance, which could be nice to annotate “algae present” “algae absent”. There are also examples from “lobster mushrooms” to lichens that are ‘individuals’ which are also more than one species in tight associations. Annotation fields could be useful to someone who not only wants to observe the lichen as a whole, but who has provided evidence for the identification of the partners within it.
Also for fungi, annotations for people doing microscopic work and who have included images of the spores, asci, etc. Quickly being able to find observations with those would probably help some people! And data for specific morphology observed could too.
Playing around with some suggestions on our test server. Here’s what a moss observation looks like after Sex has been removed from Bryophyta, and Gametophyte and Sporophyte added as Life Stage options:
To which taxa would something like this apply?
What’s the use case here? Will it aid in identification or with seasonality/phenology charts? Marking a plant of a known bisexual species as bisexual seems redundant to me, but I’m not not a botanist.
What would the Annotation (eg Life Stage) and values (eg worker, queen) bee? (pun intended)
I don’t have deep knowledge of bird life stages - is immature a generally agreed upon life stage, and one that is readily discerned from photos for many species?
Annotations have a limited list of discrete values, it’s not possible to search for an enter another taxon as an annotation. You can use Observation Fields for this at the moment.
This seems pretty niche and would be better suited as an observation field.
I think a good fit for a long-gestating photo annotation functionality. So basically being able to label each photo in on observation. But something like that will have to wait until other features are completed.
For almost all species of birds you can easily discern the difference between nestlings and immature/subadult/adult, and for most species there’s an immature/subadult stage where the plumage is visibly different. Beyond that it varies a lot from species to species. For example, Bald Eagles don’t get their white heads and tails until their second year, and don’t breed until their 5th or 6th year, so you could distinguish between nestlings (haven’t left the nest yet), immature (fledged, don’t have a white head and tail yet), subadult (only identifiable by process of elimination), and adult (attending a nest).
Having a “nestling” life stage would be generally useful for almost all birds, because nests are often distinctive and right now we can only search for observations of nests with eggs in them, while observations labelled “juvenile” are almost all recently fledged birds. I’m OK with not sub-dividing the juvenile/immature/subadult life stage. Whatever you’d prefer to call it; “immature” is most widely used in North American ornithology, I think. Edit: Ornithologists make the distinction between fully grown birds and young birds, and also between mature and immature plumage. So a fully grown bird can have immature plumage, and a young bird may have mature (= indistinguishable from an adult’s) plumage. “Juvenile” is probably an acceptable word for birds which are not fully grown, have immature plumage, or both, because it’s less likely to be misinterpreted as having one of the more specific technical meanings.
What is the distinction between immature and subadult? I know juvenile as the first full plumage post-fledging (between leaving the nest and first moult), adult as the final plumage(s) (e.g. breeding and nonbreeding plumages), and immature as any plumage(s) in between. But that makes immature and subadult synonymous.
Life stage would remain standard (Egg, Larva, Pupa, Adult) but instead of male and female we would split the latter into Queen and Worker and keep the male.
Queen and Worker aren’t really Sex values though, no? I feel like they would have to fall under something new like Eusocial Role or Adult Type. IMO the more general an Annotation is, the better, then various values can be added to it for specific taxa.
I think it isn’t often used except for specific species which have more than one plumage between juvenile and adult. It seems to be the penultimate plumage before adulthood.
Many species take more than 1 year to get an adult plumage, so moult from immature plumage not to an adult one but to another transitional (e.g gulls and birds of prey).
With workers not being able to became a real female in most of groups it’s wrong to equal them to queens and call them females while they can’t reproduce and differ anatomically. With mammals where workers do become queens it makes more sense to leave 2 sexes. @upupa-epops looks like different schools have different understanding on it, if we want to leave one subadult is better, immature as broad term includes juv. and subad., so it would be wrong to leave juv-imm without subadult.
Tony, I very much appreciate your suggestion of Eusocial role as the term to use. I just read a bit about eusocial animals, and it blew my mind - there is so much more than ‘just’ bees and ants.
In highly social cockroaches (i.e. termites) there are male and female workers, and often they are juvenile (and can develop to fertile adultes), as well as in eusocial aphids, where the killer soldiers are actually the babies (=nymphs)!
It is so weird to see aphid nymphs attacking a giant ladybug larva
(imagine a bunch of baby rabbits attacking a bulldog and biting it to death - sorry, I am diverting…)
Anyways, so neither Sex nor adult type would work here, so to keep things simple I’d suggest to implement Eusocial role with the options
Queen/ fertile female
fertile male
worker
Soldier and worker casts should not be differentiated in my opinion, so in an explanatory ‘hover over’ text I would specify that both casts are included in the term ‘worker’ (or find an alternative that covers both)
Me too. It’s easy to predict what the corresponding chart will look like on the taxon page ;-)
The fact that the “Sex” annotation can be applied to bisexual plants is a potential source of confusion and/or bugs. For example, if a user erroneously applies the “Sex” annotation to a bisexual plant, a “Sex” chart is automatically displayed on the taxon page. Even if the annotation is downvoted, the chart is still displayed on the taxon page. It would be better if the “Sex” annotation were removed from the interface in the case of bisexual plants.
