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.
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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).
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Right, my understanding was that “immature” could refer to any number of plumages between juvenile and adult. Bald Eagle has like 3.
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)
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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.
I agree, plants that are monoecoious (one-house, both sexes) don’t need an annotation since it’s redundant. It gets complicated for non-monoecious plants, since different families and genera have monoecious, dioecious (male plant and female plant separate), and hermaphrodite (‘perfect’) flowering species and sometimes combinations of these depending on the individual plant (see Baccharis pilularis, Corn, or Cannabis)!
Dioecious plants are much less numerous than monoecious plants to my understanding, so the value of an annotation may be somewhat low.
Playing around with some suggestions on our test server. Here’s what a moss observation looks like after
Sexhas been removed from Bryophyta, andGametophyteandSporophyteadded asLife Stageoptions:
Could be interesting to add gametophyte/sporophyte since they have some habitat partitioning, and some are much harder to find than others (though I’m not a bryologist). To complicate things further, there are also mega and microgametophyte versions of gametophytes though it’s been awhile since my basic biology, so don’t ask me for a detailed explanation on that since I’m not an expert by any means!
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Orchidaceae (and possibly all of Lilliaceae), and Poaceae would be monoecious as far as I know.
Ginkgoaceae is dioecious.
Importantly, dioecy is somewhat uncommon–from Wikipedia:
A 1995 study found that about 6% of angiosperm species are dioecious, and that 7% of genera contain some dioecious species.[7]
In most cases, though, it is still a species characteristic. Now, we might have a use case for annotating an individual of a dioecious species as male or female.
Most Orchidaceae and Liliaceae have perfect (bisexual) flowers; they’are not monoecious. Most grasses (Poaceae) have perfect flowers but some are monoecious or dioecious.
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Right, so unless I’m missing something, if a plant has perfect flowers, it by definition is monoecious. As I understand it:
perfect=hermaphroditic/bisexual=male and female parts on same flower
monoecious= male and female parts on the same plant (but different flowers)
dioecious=male and female flowers on separate plants–e.g. Baccharis pilularis
Since perfect flowers by definition have both male and female parts (stamens and pistils) on one plant (since they’re on a single flower), then they would be considered neither a ‘male’ nor a ‘female’ plant, but hermaphroditic/perfect/bisexual–or just more simply, a plant to which the labels ‘male’ and ‘female’ do not apply.
I suppose it would be most accurate to have a 3rd label for hermaphroditic/bisexual plants, but this seems somewhat pedantic on the level of an individual species to which we’re trying to determine if it is a male or female for the purposes of annotation.
Hermaphroditic/bisexual can then automatically be assigned to species in the same way that male/female can be removed from the options for monoecious plant species. But there are lots of ways to skin a cat, I’m just thinking of the way that saves effort and reduces error. If there’s a better or more correct way to do this that I don’t know of I would be glad to hear it. I hope that doesn’t sound sarcastic, it’s not mean to be! 
Also, let me know if I’m totally off-base here, it’s been awhile since I’ve thought much about this and I’m not sure I’ve heard of the ‘male’/‘female’ construction for plants outside of iNat and people discussing Cannabis cultivation!
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In an attempt to promote or inform discussion on adding annotations for leaf phenology as a distinct category from flowering phenology, I ran across this article which talks about the conflicting impacts of climate change on leaf fall, namely that contrary to simple explanations of leafing beginning sooner and ending later, increased CO2 may lead to increased seasonal photosynthetic activity (which would hypothetically fill carbon stores earlier) causing earlier leaf fall than predicted by more simple temperature-based models.
Through a model which takes CO2 into account, the authors predicted leaf senescence (fall) with a 42% greater accuracy by predicting 3-6 day earlier leaf fall rather than later, as well as an expanded growing season overall (including period from first to last leaf) of 8-12 days rather than previous model predictions that were 2-3x greater!
So these leaf annotations could be an important way to test the newer leaf phenological models as average global temperatures increase alongside carbon dioxide, as well as increase understanding of possible effects on global carbon cycling overall.
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Monoecious = male and female in the same plant but on different flowers.
Perfect flowers = each flower has male and female organs (stamens and pistils. They’re not the same.
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That’s awesome! I would not remove the sex annotation though. In some cases it is clearly possible to tell. I know I have a couple of moss observations marked as male or female, based on their gametophyte structures.
The taxa this life cycle annotation would apply to I think would be Marchantiophyta, Anthocerotophyta, Bryophyta, Lycopodiopsida, and Polypodiopsida. (Technically, it would apply to seed plants as well, but since those usually require microscopy to even observe the gametophytes it would be unlikely to get used there.)
This would be to give a correct option for those who like to put an annotation on everything, similar to “no evidence of flowering” for phenology. Currently, the sex annotations are male, female, or can’t be determined. But in the case of e.g. an observation with flowers showing both stamens and carpels it can very well be determined that it is bisexual, so can’t be determined seems wrong. Being able to choose only either male or female seems wrong, too. Another solution might be to make it possible in these cases to pick both male AND female for an observation. I don’t think that’s currently possible.
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Hoping this is a simple request, but has the alive/dead annotation for plants been considered?
I could see potential for data quality issues, but for documenting death from drought, fire, disease, age, this could be an invaluable resource for researchers.
But that will be consistent within species. A dioecious species will always be dioecious, a hermaphroditic species will always be hermaphroditic. It is redundant to have such an annotation on the level of the individual. It is rather like annotating an observation of “Human” as dioecious – as if some humans are dioecious, others monoecious, etc. The annotations are for individual characteristics, not species-level ones.
To put it another way: within the same species, an individual can be alive or dead, flowering or not flowering; but within the same species, an individual will not be in some cases perfect, in others dioecious. This would be a redundant annotation.
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Yes, and it is rejected for now as dead part above the ground doesn’t always mean dead plants, so this kind of data would be hard to get right for regular citizen scientists, as it’s not obvious in many cases other than 100% alive. At least that’s what was said.
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Well, actually plants can be weird exactly like that as indicated by a plethora of botanical terminology. Your example would be either andromonoecious or gynomonoecious, which refers to either male or female flowers in addition to bisexual ones on the same individual. There’s also polygamous or trimonoecious, which refers to plants with male, female, and bisexual flowers all on the same individual. And then there are species where some individuals are bisexual and others are either male or female (androdioecious or gynodioecious).
Some change sex during their lifetime, others develop differently depending on their environment. For example, in some ferns bisexual gametophytes release pheromones that cause other gametophytes of the same species around them to mature to male-only without female organs. (E.g. see this publication: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351586/)
But all of this is probably way over the head of most iNaturalist users. The problem here is that in some cases it can be determined by a knowledgeable observer that a plant is something other than strictly male or female, but there is no option for that. Maybe if there was an option of “other” for sex in plants in addition to male, female and cannot be determined, that might serve as a catch-all for this botanical weirdness and variation.
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I’m sorry I didn’t find this discussion earlier. I love it!
There’s one consideration that I think hasn’t been brought up, yet. If annotations at some point are to be used to train the CV model these annotations should be limited to features observable on the supplied photos. A user may have additional sources of information that may be helpful to have with the observation. But that could be included in a comment or dedicated observation field.
I believe that feeding the CV model with annotation information will improve the results. More importantly, though, automatic characterization of images (via annotations) is the way to go with an ever expanding database.
Conifers don’t seem to have flowering and fruiting available as an annotation option. Could this be added?
One example here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68389716
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