I thought of an annotation that might be useful:
“life history”
I found that the larva option is inappropriate in some observations if add a life history option, it will be more convenient, and also add it to the explore page.
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That observation is wrong, every day is a new observation, such collages should be split.
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DQA - date is wrong?
Agreed. As has been stated earlier, An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#observations1
As beautiful and informative as the collage is, it is not an observation, it is several observations - it is not bound by a particular time. I think it may be best saved for a journal entry. Or as you mentioned possibly split with a different time for each particular observation/time with emphasis in the image as to which part of the collage it pertains to. …this gets messy…or display the collage in the notes as a supporting document and just have the particular timed observation image as the observation.
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It would be useful to be able to bring up observations where definitive microscopic characters have been photographed. For example, I was recently looking for photos of the terminalia of female Leuctra fusca (a stonefly) and had to look at all the photos of all the L. fusca observations. If an observation could be annotated to say the genitalia had been photographed, that would have helped. It tends to be the male genitalia that are important for identification in many arthropods, but it can also be female genitalia in some genera, ovipositors in some flies and sawflies, palps in male spiders. So I’m not sure what word you would use to cover all these structures, nor if annotations is the right place to record the information. Any suggestions please?
That could be a helpful observation field (or even a ‘traditional project’) to filter for - but I doubt many observers will use it or even be aware of it.
However, it would not be a suitable option for annotations, as those fields describe features of the observed organism, and not how that organism has been treated by the observer.
And, yes, of course a mosquito can be killed by the observer beforehand, and than the annotation ‘dead’ be entered - but that still describes the status of the individuum at the time of the foto was taken 
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But annotation ahould be added for the state of when you observed the organism, not time of the photo, it can be tough if you saw a mammal just before it died, but if you killed an insect, it’s annotated as alive, or all pinned insects would be dead, but we’re annotating them as alive.
I understand that an iNat-observation is (generally) regarded as a (personal) encounter between the observer and the object. However, the way iNat works is that the evidence of encounter is usually documented via photos, and depending on the time between first noticing the organism and pressing the camera shutter, there might have been fractions of a second up to hours of difference between the two timepooints (or even cases where the object was only noticed in ‘post-production’).
If I observe a butterfly emerging its pupa, or a grashopper completing its final molt, and only afterwards I remember to make some photos, I should not annotate those observations as ‘pupa’ or ‘nymph’, just because I started the observation at that life stage.
Accordingly, if a photo does not show a living organism, from my perspective I would not annotate it as living
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I agree about the first part, but would skip annotation at all in difficult cases, I always change time of observation to when I first see it, so it’s different from photo time.
That’s my recommendation as well
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“Accordingly, if a photo does not show a living organism, from my perspective I would not annotate it as living.”
If we followed your practice as described in your last sentence, I think that would greatly diminish the value of iNaturalist observations. For the little water beetles that I frequently record, the usual procedure is collect them alive, put them in a tube of alcohol, examine them later, maybe months later. If I put them on iNaturalist, they are dead specimens photographed under the microscope. But the important information is that that species was living at the place where I found it on the day I found it. Marking it as dead (and casual? because by then it is in my house) doesn’t provide a useful biological record.
I suppose I could photograph it alive when I catch it, in which case it would be an unidentifiable black speck; and then produce a second observation of it dead in my house months later, and link the two observations in some way. But that is far too much hassle to go through. Not least because it would mean every beetle had to go into a separate tube at time of capture and have the file number of the photo recorded on the tube.
Or have I misunderstood you? Maybe you aren’t suggesting annotating it as dead, just not annotating it as living if the photo is of a dead specimen?
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As mentioned before, there is no obligation to choose between ‘alive’ or ‘dead’.
My recommendation was to just leave it un-annotated for uncertain cases.
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OK, we aren’t in as wide a disagreement as I thought.
I just submitted an observation of a tree cut down and chewed upon by an American beaver. But, there isn’t any option in the dropdown list for this. I entered a comment: “Evidence of presence”.
I am not sure exactly what value should be added. Maybe “evidence of feeding activity” would be one. For a beaver’s activity in North America, this is a fairly obvious thing. Maybe this value wouldn’t work for something like a fed upon carcass. I was also thinking that there could be some kind of value in the dropdown list for pileated woodpecker holes and white-tailed deer scrapes. Neither one of these matches up with any of the existing values.
My best suggestion to solve this is to keep the existing four values and add an option to make an entry in this field. I know that this is possible to code.
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If you mean annotations, there’s none you can add now, but feeding signs with many more types of evidence are proposed in this topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627
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Someone just two entries to the “Observation Fields:”
That is one way of adding the information.
Observation Fields (2)
Beaver evidence:
chewing
Beaver-chewed Wood?:
yes
Thanks for that link.
This is a quote/bullet point from that discussion about annotations:
- In general I’d prefer that the annotation not be of very niche use but can be used for a good number of observations.
A beaver’s tree cutting/chewing work is pretty unique. Like I stated in my original entry, it is difficult to think of a value that would apply to more animals. A value of “Feeding Activity” would be difficult to assign to a specific animal in the case of a carcass. You could tell if a bear, wolf or bird came to a carcass if there were tracks around the dead animal. But, then you would use “tracks” as the evidence.
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Why? You’d add both tracks and feeding activity in this case, I don’t see beavers as unique, you can easily id hares and moose eating bark, as well as many tree-eating beetles, for them it’d be a very useful annotation.
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I’m moving this discussion to the Annotations thread.
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If it’s a caterpillar I captured and reared, then the location and time are where and when I captured it. I do not find the location of the rearing jar to be a relevant data point.
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