Make crustaceans and myriapods iconic taxa

Feature Requests
22

Does the phyletic level of iconic taxa matter though? These are meant to be cute icons to help sort and process things, not a visual cladogram, right?

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23

I would appreciate very much if anybody of the curators in charge would deal with the subject seriously.Many thanks in advance!

24

In February this year wo hade a discussion here in the forum that crustaceans and myriopods and perhaps some more groups of living creatures should have their own icons. Nothing has happend in the last month. I believe that steady drop carves the stone. Something you achieve only when you repeat it on and one. So i am doing just this, again!

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25

The feature request for this is open, so I have moved the above post here. It’s worth pointing out that curators have no control over iconic taxa and icons - this would be the domain of staff.

26

Absolutely yes!!

27

You - are at least - Under Review.
Plants remain sadly blind.

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28

This is iNat. Probably best not to draw too much attention to those areas that have not yet been taken over by taxon splits. I’m having visions of a hundred iconic taxa to choose from.

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29

haha true

30

Here’s my unpopular take.

I think the best people to ask about what to make iconic taxa are new/casual users. I feel like all of us here on the forum are an unrepresentative sample of the average user, and I’d not want to see the iconic taxa become something with a bunch of specialized options that most users won’t even recognize.

As an insect guy, I’d love to see like 10 different insect orders up there. I mean, there’s as much species diversity in just beetles as there are in all plants combined- if we’re splitting plants, why not have beetle families listed? There’s more ichneumon wasp species (estimated 100k) than “vertebrate” species (more like 70k). Why do they get lumped in with “insects” while tiny groups like “birds” with a pathetic 10k species count get their own icon?

There’s a simple answer, and that’s that most inat users aren’t bug dorks like I am. The average new user to inat (who is most likely the one using those icons) knows the differences between “bird, reptile, mammal, plant, insect, spider”… but not necessarily the difference between a myriapod and a remipede. And I’m not saying this to be condescending to newer users… looking at the mockups of how plants should be split into different icons, I honestly would have no clue which of those to click on if I found a new plant, because I simply don’t know plant taxonomy. We’re all ignorant about the taxa we’re ignorant about. Everyone brings their own area of expertise, but the icons should be something so broad that virtually everyone, regardless of their specific expertise, can understand. I think we here on the forum who live and breathe iNat are probably not the ones to ask about what makes sense as the iconic taxa, since we’re not the ones the buttons are meant for. If you already know what “gymnosperm” means, you probably don’t need an icon to click on to find them.

I think if we want to re-evaluate the iconic taxa, the way to do it is to figure out what categories of life the average user is searching for, and make the iconic taxa the “top searched” categories, since that will provide the most streamlined searches for the most users. If “crustacean” is a top search, make it into an icon. If searching specifically for “monocots” or “dicots” is common enough, make icons for them. I have a feeling the current icons are a pretty good representation of this. But an iconic taxa selection based off of what we idiosyncratic “power users” on the forum would like to see is going to result in some stuff showing up that most users won’t find helpful. (Warning: If I become a crazy billionaire, I’m buying iNat and making “Archaic Sun Moths” the top icon.)

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31

I agree. Iconic taxa should be iconic. That is the whole point of them. The reason why there are more animal iconic taxa is not that iNat loves animal people more than plant people, but that the average person is better at broadly IDing animals than at IDing plants.

Iconic animal taxa usually have an easy to see set of features pretty unique to that taxon, conserved throughout most of the species.
Looking at plants, that is just not really the case for most.

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32

Aside from iconic taxa, we used to have more taxa that fit this use case.

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Now, “pond scum” is not a taxonomic entity. Cyanobacteria, Chlorophyta, Xanthophyceae, and Lemnoideae can all be “pond scum.” But I will argue that this was a useful taxon. It would have allowed limnologists or others who know how to separate different “pond scum” taxa to see just “pond scum” without having to sort through the entire “Life” taxon.

“All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others” – and non-taxonomic categories can sometimes be the most useful for iNaturalist’s purposes.

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33

Trees and seaweed would also be practical.

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34

I reckon such non-taxa should be covered by observation fields and/or projects. I’m surprised that no one seems to have created an observation field for such “types” of plant, like algae, herbaceous plant, shrub and tree. Yes, there is this observation field: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/34, but it doesn’t cover the other types of plant, only trees.

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35

I see there is ‘seaweed’
But only 27 obs.
We have a tree project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/trees-of-southern-africa-id but it does not get much ID traction.

Thanks to your prompting I found 2 new projects to join
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/seaweeds-of-southern-africa
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/seaweeds-of-cape-town

36

but i thought viruses weren’t living

37

That’s debatable.

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38

I think certainly, limiting iconic taxa to clades would be a mistake. There would just be too many then. Unless we’re going to do things like put animals and plants in the same iconic taxon, as they’re both eukaryotes, which are nested deep with Archaea.

There are 14 current iconic taxa, unknown, Chromista, Plantae, Protozoa, Fungi, Amphibia, Mammalia, Reptilia, Aves, Actinopterygii, Mollusca, Arachnida, Animalia and Insecta. None of these are monophyletic except for Fungi, Amphibia, Mammalia, Aves, Actinopterygii, Mollusca, Arachnida and Insecta. Plantae comes close, the omission of Picozoa (which could easily be fixed) is the only thing stopping it from being a clade. But all iconic taxa, except for unknown and Animalia, are the same as a taxon. iNaturalist should avoid non-monophyletic taxa, so this means the non-monophyletic iconic taxa should not be the same as a taxon.

By the way, I actually support replacing the monophyletic iconic taxon Actinopterygii with a paraphyletic iconic taxon for fishes. Actinopterygii is not such a widely-understood concept among the general public.

And the current system of viruses, bacteria and archaea being unknown is bad. Unknown should only be for unidentified observations and ungrafted taxa. Viruses, bacteria and archaea are hardly unknown, but rather they just happen not to belong to any other iconic taxon. For the sake of reducing the number of iconic taxa, bacteria and archaea should be combined as prokaryotes.

Herps should also be an iconic taxon, as amphibians and reptiles are frequently associated even though herps are not a clade.

And Chromista and Protozoa should be the same iconic taxon, protists. Currently, the iconic taxon Chromista (and Animalia) doesn’t have a button in the observations search, which is unacceptable. If there are too many iconic taxa to include a button for all of them, reduce the number of iconic taxa!

And maybe Arachnida and Insecta should be combined into Arthropoda. The vast majority of arthropod observations are insects anyway. And there’s a reason people frequently confuse other arthropods with insects.

And let’s drop molluscs, (they’ll then be in other animals, of course), to reduce the number of iconic taxa. While molluscs are some of the most-well known animals, the concept of molluscs doesn’t see that well-known. I was thinking of combining with arthropods to make protostomes, but I don’t think protostomes are a well-known concept.

So I propose that we have 12 iconic taxa; unknown, viruses, prokaryotes, protists, plants, fungi, other animals, fishes, herps, birds, mammals and arthropods.

39

Are reptiles and amphibians more closely related than, say, reptiles and birds?

40

How would that work with the ID/taxonomy system? Currently when you click an iconic taxon, it fills in the identification from one of taxa available in iNat’s taxonomy tree. That wouldn’t work here in the way it’s currently programmed.

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41

it really makes the taxonomists mad, it’s like hereticism or something to allow polyphylletic groups, even if you also allow tagging to finer/coarser scale ones too. A lot of them just aren’t willing to compromise or share at all, and only want their way for this community. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any way to dislodge them a they all have moderation rights within their curatorial rights. So yeah. Short of lobbying the site admins to crack down, it isn’t gonna happen.

1 Like