Sorry - don’t remember saying that?
But @annkatrinrose is the botany prof for terminology questions
I am so sorry. I misremembered who said it. It was in reply to you.
I apologize. It is difficult for me to keep up with the longer threads.
1 Like
yes!! I think it would also be helpful for insects and other animals. It feels wrong to mark an insect wing as “organism” as the post itself isn’t displaying a whole organism, but a fragment of it, which I believe is how posts should be handled. Sometimes there are posts of just the thorax of a beetle, where the whole organism isn’t shown. I recently found a mandible from a stag beetle, and I want to mark it so badly as “fragment.” Shells as well of course. I think it’s much better than having “wing”, “leg”, “scale” and other specific options.
2 Likes
yeah, I also think it would be kind of weird if you could sort for something specific like “limb”. I don’t really see someone going “Today I want to see some pictures of frog libs”, and I don’t really know that those would be IDable anyway.
I would definitely vote for having “fragments” for more than just mollusks. The reason I’m only advocating for mollusks is just because I’m a sheller and I know that there are quite a lot of shells that can be IDed to species just from a fragment and that a good number of fragments are posted to iNat. For example, I have probably made 10-50 IDs to species on fragments of: Giant Atlantic cockle, channeled duck clam, scotch bonnet, lettered olive, shark eye, Florida fighting conch, lightning whelk, knobbed whelk, sawtooth pen shell, and probably a lot more.
Presently twice as many people are for mollusk fragments (15) than are against it (7). Do I need to turn this into a feature request or is it already sort of one since this is where we are supposed to talk about all annotations?
Yes, keeping discussion here is good. Feature requests for new annotations are not currently being accepted. See:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/about-the-feature-requests-category-please-read-before-posting/69
I agree that conifers should have the option for fruiting/cones and/or pollen cones. This is exactly analogous to the angiosperm.
I don’t think annotations should exist for things that are not fundamental characteristics of the biology of the organism, so to me, “fragment” should not be added as an option for mollusks or other organisms. That’s just a characterization of the condition of the evidence.
1 Like
I apologise if any of this has been said before, there are too many replies for me to read them all: I observed a lot of fungi last month and noticed that there weren’t any annotations available for them. I think adding an “evidence of presence” with the options “fruiting body”, “mycelium”, “spores”, etc… might be helpful. However, I’m no expert at all when it comes to mycology, so someone who knows more about this than I might disagree with the usefulness of this.
Additionally, I think annotations would be used more widely, if they were made available in the app. As I think most people are taking photos with their phones, uploading them via the app is the easiest and fastest way to do so. I personally upload all my observations there, then edit them in the browser (though sometimes I simply forget the latter part). For example: There is an entire area under every observation just dedicated to the “favourite” button. I think that could be replaced with a more useful area for annotations, observation fields, etc. and the favourite button moved to the top right next to/above the “share” button.
2 Likes
Why are annotations removed in this case:
Someone observed a beetle larva. I IDed it, and added all annotations including life stage larva.
Another person then IDed it as a different insect, so the community ID became “Winged and once winged insects.” The annotation for life stage disappeared, because larva isn’t an option at that level. However eventually more IDs for the beetle were added, so I thought my life stage annotation would be re-instated, but it wasn’t. It had to be added again.
I know not all insects have larval stages, but why remove an annotation that someone has added? And why not be able to say something is a larval insect when it obviously is, but hasn’t been IDed fully?
If it really is an issue that annotations can’t be added until something is more exactly IDed, why on earth do “Unknown” observations allow an annotation for “Sex”? That is really not relevant for (most) plants, fungi, viruses, bacteria, and yet it is there as an option.
Sorry if this has been covered above. This thread is just too long to fully absorb.
4 Likes
There could be an infinite number of annotations if we made every distinction that matters to every scientific person. In researching for my master’s thesis, I found out that there are 11 different kinds of Carolina bays. Daniel Janzen’s book on Costa Rican natural history has a map showing 19 different life zones in that relatively small country. At some point, we have to strike the right balance between scientific completeness and maintaining usability for our wide user base. I would hate to see iNaturalist become yet another venue for gatekeeping academics to shut out the non-academic population. The ongoing contention over taxonomy, and suggestion by some that common names should be eliminated, shows that we are at risk of just that.
2 Likes
I raised the issue (again) of “egg” not being available at the level of animal (October 2023), which has since been addressed. I’ve now been going through observations where the community taxon is at the level of “Animals”, and find that the same problem occurs for larvae. If I know that something is a larva of an insect (for example), but I don’t know what kind of insect, I can’t add the annotation “larva”; only “adult”, “juvenile” and “egg” are options. Also, even if I do know the group of insects (say Diptera), if they has been priori disagreement about the phylum, “larva” isn’t available as an annotation, unless my identification happens to make a previous ID be considered a “maverick”.
Can larva be made available at the level of Animal, since animals other than insects have larvae? For example, many marine animals have a larval stage, even if it is rarely observed (mollusks have veliger larvae and trochophore larvae). As with “egg”, if someone thinks that is wrong they can disagree.
3 Likes
I have a question which I don’t know if it has already been addressed here (long thread). I have come across an observation of a particular parasitoid wasp of a gall midge where the gall was collected at the beginning of October. The wasp adult emerged close to the end of November - there is a good chance that this could reach genus level or better. It is difficult to say if the emergence was accelerated or slowed by the rearing of the galls. The observation date is the day of collection when it likely was a larva but the images are of the emerged adult which can greatly help with identification. My main question is would the annotation of life stage match the collection date stage or of the emerged adult. I know the “easy out” would be to say this is captive (pushing this off into the abyss) but it was not on the collection date.
1 Like
If the observation shows the adult, the date of the observation should be the date that the adult was observed, not the collection date.
It seems like this should be handled by creating two linked observations (one of the gall, a later one of the adult, with corresponding dates).
6 Likes
Two dates must be 2 obs.
4 Likes
The two obs are linked but both have the collection date. I agree that the adult should have the emerged date somewhat, although the timing of the life stage is artificial. To what extent is unknown. This begs becoming captive because of the possible altered natural emergence date but the downside is that it will become obscured to most identifiers then. I would like a few more opinions before I weigh in.
Agree with @spiphany and @dianastuder - Two different dates = two observations. I would link them as well, either in note text or with an observation field.
The adult should be at the date of emergence/photo taking and would be captive, but you can tag IDers in comments to alert them. The photos of a casual observation are still available to use for taxon photos and such on iNat (I think).
5 Likes
So, did you do the original observation with images of the gall at larval stage, and then a second observation after the adult emerged? Or are you saying you put the observation date as the day you collected it, even though you posted it after the adult emerged?
I would do the first observation on the day I collected, and then the second observation after they emerged. Link the two observations, and also use the “same specimen over time” observation field.
It was not my observation. I just came across it when I was identifying.
I already mentioned what the OP selected to do.
The first observation was of the gall (midge). The second observation was of a parasitoid wasp of the midge that was reared from the collected gall. They both had the collected date.
If I came across the observation with both larvae and adult pics from a very different time, I would use the DQA to downvote both Date is Correct and Organism is Wild. I’d also leave a comment explained what I did and why.
1 Like
Yeah, that is not what occurred. I edited my above answer.