Do you really think the majority of iNat users are annotating? Let alone looking at other people’s annotations? If we’re driving the website based on tools exclusively used by casual users, then I suspect the desktop website would look very, very different and a whole lot more like the app.
Honestly I wish they would annotate, of course. So many hundreds of hours of life I could get back from the nearly 10,000 annotations I’ve done
This was the point of my original question, to ask both how/if this could be implemented, and specifically what kind of language would be useful. Instead of arguing about a “Harvest Ready” annotation I didn’t even propose, do you have other suggestions or do you believe that “Ripe” is the most functional term? If I’m doing this as observation fields, the question is still relevant because people will have the same reaction.
If phenology varying from year to year is a reason not to annotate something, I have bad news about the tool we’re talking about! Past data is a valuable starting point for all phenological concerns.
I live for the Metadata tool, it is my close and dear friend! I’m mostly trying to fight what I have dealt with in Observation Fields, where there’s way too many redundant fields that make a data mess for a plant trait that is otherwise universal. Whether it’s “Mature Seeds of Illinois,” “Prairie Harvest 2026” and seven different “Mature Seeds” “Ripe Seeds” etc, observation fields are not great options for cross-regional data sharing. See my trials and tribulations trying to resolve redundant observation fields here: Bugs on Flowers: A Survey of Too Many Observation Field Options. I promise I only ask about annotations because I know how messy OFs get.
But i guess folks aren’t into this so I’ll drop it. Thank you to the people who engaged in good faith!
I would like to bring to the attention of the staff that the current life stage annotations for Thysanoptera (thrips) only includes egg, nymph, and adult. Since thrips have distinct larval and pupal stages, it would be more accurate if the annotations also included larva and pupa.
I was recently asked whether I could add those life stages, but I wasn’t aware of how to do so. I put up a thread on the forum, where @cthawley kindly responded and suggested that I post here to bring this to the attention of the staff.
Interesting, it looks like thrips have a metamorphosis that is neither complete nor incomplete. But the sources that I looked at do seem to use larvae/pupae vs. nymph.
While searching for tick (Ixodida) larvae on iNaturalist using the life stage annotation, I noticed that the available options are currently only Egg, Juvenile, and Adult.
I was wondering whether it might make sense to have Egg, Larva, Nymph, and Adult as separate options, at least for taxa such as Ixodidae (I’m not sure for Argasidae). “Juvenile” seems somewhat ambiguous in this context, since it could refer to either a larva or a nymph.
Apologies if this has already been covered in this huge thread (I don’t know if there is a way to search within, and I’m not quite brave enough to read through the entire thread from start to finish!)
I don’t think offering the categories Larva and Nymph is better than just Juvenile. Why? First, I personally would classify Nymph as a kind of larva, in general. Having both categories offered would suggest to me that technically they’re different, at least for ticks, but not knowing the difference (in many cases), I just wouldn’t annotate life stage at all. If I did, I’d have a 50% chance of being wrong. A lot fewer observations are annotated than we’d like already, so making observations less likely to get ID’s and less likely to get accurately ID’d seems a poor choice.
However, having more precise annotations would be really great! I’m afraid the best way for a researcher to get them done right is to do them himself in his own datasheet (perhaps by searching for observations annotated “juvenile” if he hasn’t already learned that most iNat observations aren’t annotated at all).
Is there a process to get teneral added to other groups?
It’s not the most optimal to have to use a project to keep track of teneral chironomids. Which are more pale than full adults, the antenna of males look quite different, and are a good indicator of emergence time.
I think it’s been brought up several times in this thread. But I’m in favor of the other direction for teneral. It’s not really a life stage, but rather a condition. I admit I am far less familiar with arthropods outside Hemiptera. But I’d imagine any that molt are teneral afterwards, whether that’s distinguishable or not. And many molt multiple times. A true bug is teneral 5 times. That’s not a life stage. I agree that a project is not the most ideal solution (I’ve created one for hemiptera too, it’s silly that cicadas have the option and no other hemiptera do just because their nymph molts are rarely seen and they molt spectacularly), but I really don’t think it’s an appropriate life stage annotation for at least any arthropods I’m even vaguely familiar with.
I know it can be useful for emergence data. But so many observation fields and projects have useful data. Teneral just doesn’t fit the life stage annotation.
