You should be able to select multiple annotations for Life Stage and Sex in the same way that you are able to select multiple annotations for Evidence of Presence and for precisely the same reason, i.e., one observation can contain multiple life stages and/or multiple sexes of the same species.
Because you can have, for instance, an observation of a doe with her fawn or an observation of a mated pair of mallards, it makes sense that you should be able to annotate an observation as both adult and juvenile or male and female. That way, someone seeking observations of, for instance, a juvenile deer will also find them in observations that include adults, or male mallards in observations that include female mallards. As it stands now, if an observation contains both male and female of a species or both adult and juvenile, I’ll simply not annotate at all, rather than partially/arbitrarily annotate one way or the other.
And frankly, it seems needless and nonsensical to duplicate an observation just to annotate it differently.
I am not asking for new exotic annotation options here, but rather a lucid rethinking of a basic mechanic on existing options for reasons that seem dead obvious (and internally consistent).
If the purpose of annotating an observation is to help people find what they are looking for, then being able to find a fawn, whether it’s with a doe or not, makes sense. And conversely, being effectively forced to decide whether an observation is going to be searchable for one subject over another doesn’t really make sense.
Honestly this seems like a no-brainer to me