I’m not sure if this is a Bug Report or a General topic. When looking at the Bug Report, it seemed to focus a lot on the platform, and this is more a coding issue, I think.
Anyway, for the observation in question, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/229940363, the Life Stage options only include Adult and Egg, when I think it should at least include Larva, Nymph, Pupa, and Juvenile (though it could probably include more).
so I’m wondering if it’s some coding issue when there’s a combination of Butterflies and Moths and Typical Sawflies in an observation (admittedly, I didn’t do a search for other occurrences).
Just wanted to bring it to someone’s attention, if it’s an issue that needs addressed.
It is because not all species in Pterygota have larval stages - for example, bugs have nymphs. So the options of Larva, Nymph, Pupa are only available when the ID is of something that has those stages. So you can annotate as Larva for both sawflies and butterflies, but you can’t for Pterygota because not all members of that class have larval stages.
But, since both sawflies and butterflies have larval stages, shouldn’t that be an option for this observation? I don’t know the code behind the site but it seems like there’d be a way to achieve that.
iNaturalist should allow insects to be annotated as Larva if they’re at Pterygota, as more than one order of Pterygota has larval stages. Annotating pterygotans as larvae is useful even if you don’t know the order.
If iNaturalist added Holometabola, that observation would be able to be annotated as larva, as all Holometabola orders have larval stages, and sawflies and lepidopterans both belong to Holometabola. But this likely wouldn’t be feasible.
On a related note, I encountered an observation of a sauropsid egg, but I wasn’t sure if it was a bird or reptile egg. But I couldn’t annotate it as an egg because it was only at Vertebrata. Thankfully, now that’s been fixed.
I agree that it would be good to be able to annotate larva as such even if you don’t know if they are caterpillars or beetle larvae or sawflies. I have commented about that in another thread, perhaps the Annotations thread. But I was just explaining why Larva is not available in Pterygota as it stands.
It is only a workaround, but you can add unannotatable pterygota larvae to this project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/larvae-of-endopterygota
which was created by another user who was similarly frustrated with precisely this problem.
Perhaps my understanding is wrong, but I thought that all Pterygota technically have a larva stage? Some develop within the protection of an egg, ootheca, gall, or similar. If anyone knows the answer to this that would be great!
