I’ve been trying to add annotations to some of my observations. Observations for many taxa are easy-peasy. If we took a moth observation, for instance, it’s very simple to select one of the four life stages: Adult, Egg, Larva, Pupa. I’m pretty sure that we’d all get it right pretty much every time, because those life stages are so distinct and seem so obvious.
There are some taxa I’ve struggled with though. Take Spiders for example. Here there are just three choices: Adult, Egg and Juvenile. Egg seems pretty easy, at least in theory – the trouble here is seeing them in the first place, not annotating them. But Adult and Juvenile, maybe not so. Sure, there are tiny little spiderlings that are obviously juvenile just as there are huge spiders confidently sitting in the middle of their webs that are surely adults. In-between those two extremes there seems to be a whole continuum of development. At which point do we say an organism ceases to be a juvenile and is now an adult? Is it about size? Physical appearance? Or certain behaviours? Is a spider considered adult only once it has had its final moult or is it at some point before that? Might we take certain activities such as web building and say that’s what’s makes it adult? I’m really not sure.
I’ve used spiders here as an example, but I know there are other taxa that don’t have such well delineated life stages as moths. Mammals for example have just two: Adult of Juvenile. I thought it might be useful to start a discussion so that experts in particular taxa could state what they see as the crucial differentiations in the life stages of their chosen animals. Thank you.
Remember that the purpose of annotations is to help someone who is interested in that taxon, filter for images of that life stage (moth larvae, plants that are flowering, fish that are dead, etc.).
That is why, if it’s a tough judgement call, it’s okay to leave an annotation blank. Because even if you’re technically correct with the annotation, if it’s too nuanced, then it’s not serving the purpose of broad sorting.
For example, the spiders that you mentioned. Maybe a taxon expert can visually tell the difference between a “teenaged” (juvenile) spider and an older adult. But how many people searching for images will have that level of technical expertise?
At which point do we say an organism ceases to be a juvenile and is now an adult? Is it about size? Physical appearance? Or certain behaviours?
Adulthood for spiders is based on sexual maturity after first molt. This makes them often times unable to be aged without microscopy. To help, females develop a external plate on the underside of their abdomen which can usually indicate adulthood and males develop swollen, tips on their pedipalps. A non-adult male spider can have swollen pedipalps and this is technically “subadult”. They will still look different though. because they well be swollen but covered in skin and an adult male’s palps will have exposed hooks, loops, spines, or coiled wires.
To annotate a “sub-adult” know they might look identical in size to an adult and even build perfect webs, but biologically, they are still juveniles because they cannot yet reproduce. If you cannot clearly see the epigynum or mature pedipalps, and the spider isn’t an obvious tiny spiderling, it is safest to leave the life stage annotation blank.
So to conclude, don’t worry about feeling the need to add an annotation. It is only useful if it serves its purpose for research; if it isn’t or can’t, it is better to just leave it out than to make the people who want the data filter stuff out.