So follow that for the emerged adult obs ?
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Got it. Then I think the appropriate action would be to downvote the second observation of the emerged adult for Organism is Wild and Date is Accurate and leave a comment.
Many gall wasps (though not all) overwinter in the gall (though I’m no gall wasp expert). Maybe the warmth of the building that the gall was kept in caused an abnormal hatching date? Regardless, having the observation of the adult be RG at the collection date of the gall is incorrect phenology data.
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Agreed.
And just to be clear (ie excuse my ramble). The original observation was for a gall midge. The gall that the midge occupied was being reared. The parasitoid wasp was likely “hosted” by the midge. I don’t think the wasp would be referred to as a gall wasp as it is not the gall former. I am unsure if the adult wasp overwintering was accelerated or not, however, as an adult it would be forced to no longer feed on the host but resort to some form of nectar which would seem lacking normally in the winter months. The adult wasp role is to reproduce, again it would need to find reproducing adult gall midges and reproduce on them, biocontrolling the next generation of midges.
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That’s another reason why we need Endopterygota. Then the other person would probably have remained in that, preserving tha life stage.
Btw., I have a link https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=any&without_term_id=1&taxon_id=47208&ident_user_id=ralfmuschall&reviewed=any that helps me clean up the life stages I forgot to enter to my beetles (change taxon_id for other insects, and ident_user_id of course).
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Hello everyone!
I’ve been looking at the topics suggesting more annotations and I have some new suggestions to add to the topic.
Insects
First, some suggestions for insects. “Leaf mine” evidence of presence has been proposed, and I would tend to agree that plant mine could be a better term. But one question comes to mind, should it also include wood bores made by insects? Or should it be made a separate evidence of presence?
Another evidence of presence for insects could be “oviposition scar”, as some species only leave that evidence on plants.
Plants
Life stage is very useful for plant phenology. If “life stage” is implemented, it would be nice to add “senescent” to the allowed value.
Fungi
Also, there are only very few annotations available and proposed on this thread. So here are some annotations that would be valuable to add for mycologists.
Life stage:
“mitosporic (anamorph), meiosporic (teleomorph)” for all fungi | multiple values allowed
“spermogonia (0), aecia (I), uredinia (II), telia (III), basidia (IV)” for rust fungi | multiple values allowed
Evidence of presence:
“fruitbody/mycelium/sclerotia/symptoms (already proposed)/scar/DNA” | single value allowed
Fertility (for lichens):
“thallus/sterile, soralia, soredia, isidia, pycnidia, sporocarp”
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For Evidence of Organism, instead of adding ones like “scratch or rub”, I’ve always wished they’d change “track” to simply “sign” or “spoor” to cover any evidence of an animal’s presence. Otherwise the list could get overwhelming, “sign” would cover nests, tracks, scratches, chew marks, fur, scrapes, cough pellets, etc.
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Although newbie users might think that it means the interpretive sign at the zoo enclosure.
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‘Trace’ is probably better than ‘track’ in this respect, and perhaps less ambiguous than ‘sign’.
Ichnology is the science of organismal traces (and trace fossils); as such, it deals with trackways (“tracks”, footprints), burrows (of worms or beavers), gnawing marks (on bones or walnuts) etc.
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Part of my 2024 goals is to annotate more frequently. Mostly I identify life stage or sex based on visible anatomical features. I just ran into a novel issue with an observation’s annotations. Someone annotated an animal’s sex as “cannot be determined,” but I CAN determine it as female. Yet, as soon as an annotation is made, one is no longer given the option of annotating with the correct sex and instead can only agree or disagree. Thus, someone could block future annotations merely by adding “cannot be determined,” which would prevent accurate annotation. So my question is, why does someone’s choice of annotation automatically preclude anyone else from also annotating with anything other than agree or disagree. Given the nature of community identification, at very least one should be allowed to, you know, actually CORRECT the annotation.
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This situation is addressed here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/can-i-only-disagree-with-annotation-or-can-i-also-correct-it/24238
and is part of the design of annotations (so not a bug, even if it can be frustrating).
Users can now delete annotations added to their own observations (see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-updates-for-december-2023/47962 for this recent change). So you can ask the observer to delete and then enter the correct annotation value.
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I like that, as another user pointed out, “sign” could be misinterpreted. “Trace” covers everything related to evidence of an animal’s activity.
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Two years later.
Would like to annotate this one as juvenile leaves
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/76850673
(and since it is pine also need - cones - please)
I believe it would be quite interesting to add more phenology information to annotations of seaweeds (Phaeophyceae, Chlorophyta, Rhodophyta). Phenology graphs are very interesing for plants and being able to have them for these organisms when they are fertile (they show cystocarps, conceptacles,… etc.). The current annotations on seaweeds are rarelly informative whereas there are many observations where fertile organisms could be detected, such as most Fucus observations. These observations would also be informative for scientists, given that the phenology of many algae is often missunderstood and differs between geographical areas. Furthermore, climate change is inducing changes in the phenology of many species. One example is that of Bifurcaria bifurcata, as in this observation, when many fertile individuals were detected, in spite of the date being 2 months earlier according to the literature for the region. It would be of interest to be able to record these changes.
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Still doing battle with unwanted and irrelevant Sex annotation.
Here for example - how could I explain - that a fallen flower is NOT - cannot be determined. It hasn’t even got an ID yet - but the annotation is available.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/202262263
Sorry should have been for plants
198 obs reviewed
sex - cannot be determined.
That is both wrong and not useful ?
Went thru that list. Only Gingkgo is dioecious.
Hi, a lot of those Sex annotations were mine.
I add “Cannot Be Determined” to these observation because the plant species, to my knowledge, are actually dioecious. (For example Populus spp., Acer negundo, etc.)
In this case, it is possible to categorize these plants as Male or Female. But many (most?) observations aren’t annotated with a sex. By marking the observation as “Cannot Be Determined”, it reduces the pool of uncategorized observations.
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I defer to your knowledge.
For our local fynbos we need the sex annotation for Restionaceae and Leucadendrons. But most of the rest - whether wildflowers or cultivated should not have the annotation as the plants are monoecious (and newbies treat iNat as the gender police, which is fraught)
I have similarly used “cannot be determined” on observations of dioecious species showing flowering plants but too blurry to determine sex. From an identifier perspective though, it feels more likely that I’ll come across a nonsensical sex annotation on a bisexual plant. E.g. Symphyotrichum pilosum has been annotated as both “cannot be determined” and “female” while on the other hand Rhododendron catawbiense has annotations for “cannot be determined” and “male” and Daucus carota according to annotations comes in male, female, and cannot be determined. None of these annotations make sense since all these plants have hermaphroditic flowers. It feels there are a lot more of these around than actual use cases but that’s probably because dioecious plant species where this annotation actually makes sense are rare. Where it does apply, it can provide some fascinating insights into male/female ratios and may raise the question whether those are biologically relevant or simply due to observer bias with people noticing flowers of one sex more than others.
It has been suggested in the past to limit the sex annotation to only those species where it applies, but that gets complicated. In the meantime, I’ve marked at least one observation of a monoecious species as male because I was looking at pollen grains (= male gametophytes) under the microscope. So there may still be an actual use case scenario even for those species with hermaprhoditic sporophytes because of the weirdness of the plant life cycle and its alternation of generations. (It would be nice to be able to annotate sporophytes and gametophytes at least for the bryophytes and seedless vascular plants.)
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Would it solve the problem just to change the wording? “Sex of organism”
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That’s a point.
Newbies treat it as - what is your preferred pronoun.
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I agree it’s annoying to see a Sex annotation for a monoecious plant species, but I don’t think there’s a major downside to it, data quality wise. Anyone studying the plant would know to disregard it. Yes, some people might get the impression that a monoecious species is actually dioecious, but I think that’s a small issue. If anyone has a list of genera (or higher) that contain only monoecious species, I can remove them from the Sex annotation. It wouldn’t make sense to do it on a species-by-species basis.
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