You guys might be interested in this old feature request if you haven’t seen it before: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-taxon-field-functionality-analogous-to-observation-fields/7013
Read my first sentence.
I think certainly, limiting iconic taxa to clades would be a mistake.
I’m against non-monophyletic taxa. I’m not against non-monophyletic iconic taxa. In fact, given the necessity of non-monophyletic iconic taxa, perhaps they shouldn’t be called “iconic taxa”, but “iconic groups” or “iconic categories” instead. The name is already a misnomer because other animals are not a taxon. I’ve never heard of all animals except for amphibians, mammals, non-dinosaurian reptiles, modern birds, ray-finned fishes, molluscs, arachnids and insects being classified in a taxon without these animals. And how can unknown be a taxon at all, when it includes observations with no identification?
Are crustaceans closer to sponges than to insects? Is Thermoprotei closer to Thermococci than to eukaryotes? The answer to both of those questions is no. Yet both crustaceans and sponges are in other animals, unlike insects, and both Thermoprotei and Thermococci are both in Archaea and in unknown, unlike eukaryotes. According to iNat that is. According to any accurate taxonomy that recognises Archaea, eukaryotes are in Archaea.
Some are suggesting making archaea an iconic taxon. The truth is, it would be paraphyletic much like herps.
iNat cannot have 45 or more iconic taxa, nor can it have modern birds not be a separate iconic taxon from any other living animals. I’m not sure how many monophyletic iconic taxa would be required to make sure that modern birds are the only living members of their iconic taxon, but I cannot see it being any less than 45, and that’s not counting the extinct ones. It defeats the purpose to have so many iconic taxa. Will we be able to have a distinctive, representative icon for each one? Certainly not! With Chromista, we were lucky that it happens to have multicellular members, otherwise it would just look like a generic microbe!
And we have way less than 45, we have 14. And it’s too many, because two of them are omitted from the observations search (I know you can search for them with the URL, but it’s not the same). If we can only include 12 in the observations search, then we should only have 12. I know there’s no way we’re including 45 or more iconic taxa in the observations search, especially since we’re not even including all 14 current iconic taxa.
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Kind of like how other animals currently works, I guess. Other animals shows that it’s possible to have an iconic taxon that isn’t a taxon. While other animals has the ID of 1, it excludes animals that belong to any other iconic taxon.
Herps should be defined as (Amphibia + Dinosauria + Reptilia + Eupelycosauria + Dicynodontia).
I guess semantically it excludes other animals? But in practice just refers to the entire kingdom Animalia
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1-Animalia
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=1&verifiable=any
See, it doesn’t have amphibians, mammals, reptiles, birds, ray-finned fishes, molluscs, or arachnids. And only 2 insect observations. Not sure why the system seems confused as to whether Megaselia halterata is an insect.
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Since I just see this I wanted to mention, I personally would like “lichen” as another iconic taxon. Due to their photosynthetic nature they just behave a lot more like plants than other fungi.
One could therefore argue that plants without chlorophyll, such as pinedrops, should also have an iconic taxon. Due to their non-photosynthetic nature they just behave a lot more like fungi than other plants.
I agree that crustaceans deserve their own category. I have a hard time searching for crabs, shrimp, and other crustaceans in the sea of other arthropod observations.
Just enter and select “Crustacea” into the Species field when you’re searching or identifying. Iconic taxa are nice-to-haves but the lack of one doesn’t prevent anyone from filtering by taxon.
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If you want more iconic taxa to be added, then which ones should be merged? We have too many, because we have 14, but only 12 are shown in the observations search.
@cyanfox The observation search could easily be reworked at the same time as iconic taxa are, to allow for more icons. At its simplest, by moving the ‘Sort By’ drop-down to the right column with the other date options, which would keep the observation search menu at the same size:
Adding ‘Chromista’ and ‘Other Animals’ to the menu would leave room for four new iconic taxa.
There is certainly a point where adding more becomes too many. I’m not sure where that point is, but I agree that 45 is too many. In my opinion 18 isn’t. My thoughts:
Vertebrates
- Leave Mammals, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Birds as is. I think the general public understands these groups as they currently are. Being a taxonomic purist and merging birds into reptiles will confuse people. Merging Reptiles and Amphibians into Herps / Herpetofauna - a classification I’ve only ever heard from people who know a fair bit more about these groups than the general public - will do the same, and doesn’t even have the justification of being taxonomically accurate.
- Replace Ray-finned Fish (Actinopterygii) with Fish (Actinopterygii + Agnatha + Elasmobranchii + Holocephali + Sarcopterygii). iNat’s taxonomic framework already considers Sarcopterygii / Lobe-Finned Fish to consist of Coelocanths and Lungfishes, but not Tetrapods. This lines up with what the general public would call a fish, and is no different from having a Reptile iconic taxa that ignores Birds. The current set up for fish is like having a Lepidosauria iconic taxa, and dumping turtles and crocodiles into ‘Other Animals’ - something I doubt anyone wants. Merging all fish into one iconic taxa also means that ‘Other Animals’ becomes ‘Other Invertebrates’, as all vertebrates will be accounted for in iconic groups. Perhaps with an icon change to a worm, instead of the bird icon with no wings.
Invertebrates
- Leave Molluscs, Insects, and Arachnids as is. Why not merge all arthropods if I’m merging all fish? Partially because we already don’t, without issue. Partially because ‘Arthropod’ is still a searchable taxa even if not iconic, and ‘Fish’ isn’t. Partially due to the number of observations. All non-ray-fined-fish combined have less than 150,000 observations, Ray finned fish have 2.6 million. Collectively less than half of Arachnids, which have 6.5 million.
- Add Crustaceans as a separate group - anecdotally they were the omission that surprised me the most when I was new to iNat. Given some of them are commonly eaten, I think most people have at least a rough idea what a Crustacean is. At 1.3 million observations, they are comfortably the largest group in ‘Other Animals’. Myriapods are the second largest group with 700k - big enough, in my opinion, but there are more important taxa.
Plants
Plants and Animals are the two ‘main’ groups of life from the general public’s point of view, and with about 206 million of iNat’s 222 million observations between them, that is reflected on this site. I think plant iconic taxa should be treated a bit more like animals than the currently are, but agree with those that have said that the general public (and also I) know much less about plant classification than animal. To attempt a balanced approach, I’d suggest:
- Mosses
- Ferns (Fern leaf icon)
- Gymnosperms (Pine cone icon)
- Flowering Plants (Flower icon)
- Convert the existing ‘Plant’ into ‘Other Plants’
I think these would be reasonably widely understood. Sure, not everyone would know the distinction, but not everyone knows that spiders, isopods, and millipedes aren’t ‘bugs’.
Despite being the vast majority of plant observations, I haven’t split Flowering Plants specifically because two flower icons with different numbers of petals is probably unclear to the general public.
Other
- Leave Fungi, Protozoa and Chromista as is.
- Add Prokaryotes to get bacteria, etc, out of ‘Unknown’, leaving ‘Unknown’ for genuine unknowns. I’d only give them one Iconic taxa, as there are very few observations for them, but the benefits of getting them out of ‘Unknown’, and lack of anything else to lump them with justifies it, in my opinion.
PS: So I lost count, and ended up at 20 iconic taxa instead of 18. Easy fix - make the menu a bit wider, add in another column and there’s room for 21. Then promote Myriapods, as the largest group by observations I’ve left in an ‘Other’ category, or split flowering plants into Monocots and Dicots.
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What about observations identified as just Vertebrata? Currently, these are in Other Animals.
And Dinosauria, Eupelycosauria and Dicynodontia?
I hadn’t thought of things ID’d only to Vertebrata. In that case, ‘Other Animals’ shouldn’t be changed to ‘Other Invertebrates’. That would also cover both non-mammalian Synapsid groups.
Currently Reptilia, Dinosauria, and Birds are three separate vertebrate classes in iNat’s framework. I understand why iNat keeps Birds separate from Reptiles, and therefore why a Dinosauria taxa that includes Birds must also be kept separate from Reptilia. However, iNat’s Dinosauria taxa doesn’t include Birds. So I don’t see why Dinosaurs shouldn’t be under Reptiles, especially since Pterosaurs are.
Of course, given observations are supposed to include recent evidence of an organism, I don’t see why anything that went extinct before the Pleistocene (at the earliest - I think the official position is a much shorter 100 years) is on iNat at all.
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