I’m curious where these numbers came from.
When I look up the Afrotropic Ecozone (which excludes North Africa because it’s faunistically quite different), there are currently 223,822 RG observations of Lepidoptera and 188,302 Needs ID observations.
I mean, personally I have 2010 RG observations of Afrotropical Lepidoptera.
Am I looking at things incorrectly? It doesn’t seem as dire as I would have expected.
Walking my talk. If you can ‘caterpillar’ in Africa - best I can do, but then it comes up in filters set by caterpillar people.
28 minutes to sp.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/229136934
I used Africa:continent. I am not sure how iNaturalist defines those boundaries but it definitely includes North Africa. First number was Lepidoptera, research grade. Second number is Lepidoptera, needs ID. I could have definitely messed up when enacting the settings (like it could have selected some much smaller group instead of Lepidoptera because I had to kept battling with that) and it’s possible I made typos while recording the numbers also. Glad there are a lot more research grade observations than I thought!
One thing people can do, if they know moth basics, is find observations stuck at order lepidoptera and try to refine those observations to family or finer. Using visually similar on the Sugestions tab you could probably get to family in many cases. Then anyone looking to identify moths in that family would be more likely to find them.
I’m working on it, but it can be daunting when:
All this leads to hesitancy and uncertainty in adding to moth IDs. Like I said though, I’m working on it. Doing a Big Year with moths in my yard, so getting more and more familiar with them.
Just a shoutout to all the Aussie moth ID’ers.
On this,
" is find observations stuck at order lepidoptera and try to refine those observations to family or finer."
From my point of view, very much a recent Observer (of Aussie moths), not an Identifier, is that I’ve found getting to a correct Family very difficult. When the CV suggest a taxa, I normally head back up to ~Family level and work from there. However, narrowing this to a particular geographic region, a state for example, still returns 100s of taxa. And if the suggested family is wrong, that’s a lot of time and bandwidth down the drain.
It is great when even a coarse taxa is provided, so long as it is accurate.
No users shouldn’t do this as it is against the idea of what an ID is - the identifier representing their own expertise - as you pointed out. Every ID should receive the same amount of scrutiny from the IDer, regardless of who else has already IDed it. As many experts will note, they do make occasional mistakes. I’ve certainly made mistakes and been corrected in my taxon of expertise, both from misclicks and honest mistakes.
There are other discussions on the forum about how this can be a problem, but one clear issue is if the person from BAMONA ever does become active on iNat and starts IDing - if they IDed these observations, their IDs would essentially be double-counted.
One “exception” (though not really) would be if an expert has taught an IDer how to make an ID of a given taxon. If the IDer can verify that same evidence independently, then it’s legit for them to make their own ID too. This isn’t really different than reading an authoritative guide and making an ID by matching characters that the guide explains. So if an expert tells someone “you can distinguish species A and B because species A has yellow legs, and species B has brown legs”, and the IDer can see that the organism has yellow legs, there’s no issue IDing as species A.
That makes sense, I would never just click “sure” on an ID and have definitely caught what I think are mis-clicks or typos from extremely experienced folks. Sounds like it would be useful to include the differentiating info from other sources like BAMONA in a comment or description, but unfortunately I think a lot of the IDs on BAMONA and other sources are simply a statement of what taxon it is without elaboration.
Necessity is not always the moth-er of invention. (Sorry). So how do you make more moth-ers who can reliably ID photos?
I’m not really into moths and don’t know even basic taxonomy and characteristics of the majority of moths in my area. Every now and then I’ll photo one but I don’t do black light observing. It’s always struck me as a tough group to get a handle on so I tend to ignore them — and given my other interests, I’m not inclined to change if it requires a large investment in time and effort. I suspect that’s not uncommon among many of us.
A colleague of mine bought Moths of Western North America —a massive tome — years ago but I don’t think he ever got into trying to ID that many. I remember finding the book rather intimidating!
The alternative is to force them. Not sure that will work! 
My perspective from “inside” the moth world (for 25 years or so) is that the disappointing percentage of RG observations among moths is a combination of several factors and trends, and I sense we find ourselves in a time of transition…hopefully for the better. Here are some notes, with particular reference to North America:
– The interest in moths has grown exponentially in the past 20 years among the general naturalist community, but the identification resources still lag far behind. Prior to the publication of the relatively recent Beadle & Leckie Peterson field guides (e.g. for the Northeastern North America), the general community had primarily one outdated Peterson field guide (with images of mounted specimens) and a 1902 Moth Book to help with IDs. A long series of highly technical monographs on select moth families and subfamilies published in the Moths of North America series by the Wedge Entomological Research Foundation are useful from a very technical standpoint but are expensive* and unapproachable for the general naturalist community. [* A substantial selection of the MONA series are now available free as downloadable pdf’s.]
– BugGuide is a vast reservoir of knowledge but it too faces the same gap between uploaders and expert identifiers. Moreover, unlike iNaturalist, bad moth images quickly get “frassed” on BG, the result being a “cleaner” (read: elite or select) set of images which naturally have a higher ID percentage.
– The fantastic resource which is Moth Photographers’ Group (for North America) has only been in existence for about 20 years (I think) and while it offers a massive resource to aid IDs, it is still not widely accessed except by specialists and a handful of us moth-ers. It’s also intimidating, and frankly quite time-consuming, to wander through MPG trying to find IDs for anything but the most distinctive macros and micros.
– My sense is that a higher percentage of moth species, micros and macros, are just going to be harder to identify than, say, birds or butterflies of North America. There are just too many similar and/or obscure or cryptic species of moths to deal with.
– The types of photographic effort and offerings required to maximize the chances of IDing moths are still not widely recognized or appreciated. That’s a topic for a whole seminar or semester course. There are just too many poor photos of moths being uploaded to iNat, often from older cell phones. Because of their small size, vast numbers, and frequent similarity among species or groups, good photographs are perhaps more important for moth ID than other popular groups, and that skill set is only slowly being developed by the large population of moth enthusiasts.
So while interest in moths is surging, the resources to aid in identifications are still, if not in their infancy, in their “teen years” and the identification challenges are just far greater than for other popular taxonomic groups.
And a lot of experts in the moth world are very active on iNat. I’d name a whole batch of them but I’d risk leaving out important contributors. They include authors of the major checklists and field guides, museum curators, museum associates, and other professionals in the field. There just aren’t enough of them and their attention and efforts are divided.
But personally, I love a challenge, so moth identification–especially field and photo identification–has become my passion.
As a handy starting point, here is a URL to examine all moths (= Lepidoptera without butterflies):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=47157&view=species&without_taxon_id=47224
You can customize that URL with any particular location and also use the filters to get subsets for RG, Needs ID, lowest Ievel ID, etc.
That’ s really useful, thank you! Is there a way to narrow this search to lifestage eg larva, without having do drill down to individual species?
I often want to find examples of caterpillars for comparison to what I’ve seen, but end up wading through lots of adult obs only to find there are none of larva.
I’m based in New Zealand and your hunch that not getting observation IDs is disheartening and puts people off is correct: I have had a friend say he no longer puts caterpillars up because they are so rarely get an ID, even at a general level.
I have also been wondering about whether it would be helpful to set up a project for our country that separates out the egg, pupa and larvae stages of moths and butterflies to help amateurs like me, with links to ID guides and info on best practice for recording raised specimens so that we can get more life cycle obs. I’d be interested in what others think about that…
I was ‘chatting’ to one of our key moth IDers here, who says he feels “more than a little overwhelmed during the warmer months when there can be 2-300 Lepidoptera observations day after day to review” - and that’s just for NZ.
I don’t know if it is the same in NZ, but in Australia the vast majority of caterpillars are impossible to ID because no-one knows what they turn into. We need people to raise the caterpillars and observe them at each stage until they are adults. There are some people doing that, and they are absolute heroes!
From the Aust Lepidoptera site:
http://lepidoptera.butterflyhouse.com.au/faqs/ident.html
“Australia has about 20,000 species of moths and butterflies. The caterpillars of less than 5% of these species are known.”
Some personal thoughts:
I make lots of IDs, but mostly for plants. I also make lots of observations of moths and have done so for 4 or 5 years now. I’m lucky to live in the region covered by the Beadle and Leckie field guide mentioned above. I’m even luckier to be friends with several very active moth observers here on iNat.
Despite all that, I feel unsure enough about my knowledge of moths that I hesitate to make many IDs of them. Sure, there are many species that are absolutely unmistakable, but those get quickly IDed without my help. And given that I’m trying to learn bryophytes in a serious way right now, I’m not at all sure I have the brain space to also get serious about moths.
But I can think of two examples of ways that IDing capacity has been increased for other taxa: first, the exceptional effort put into online fly identification workshops by @zdanko and company; and second, the annual 48-hour plant ID marathon I run for New England and New York. Now, that second example has succeeded in large part because participants have spread the word to outside botanical organizations, attracting new and experienced identifiers to iNat. There’s no reason why that couldn’t happen for moths, too. Well, no reason except the need for an organizer or two. (Oh, dear, I can see yet another rabbit hole I might be going down.)
I would encourage everyone to find a species or small genus they like and learn to identify it, if possible. It is usually less work than providing general IDs and, especially if there is no one else actively IDing it, it also provides the additional value of getting a precise ID to observations that never may have gotten one otherwise.
I’m currently the only one IDing observations of the genus Polyporivora on a regular basis. There are so far observations of 4 species, all of which (to my knowledge) are identifiable by photos and knowing the geographic location.
I feel like if everyone had a taxon, however small or obscure, they can ID, a lot more observations would reach RG, especially of those rarer once which may sit at Needs ID for months, years, or forever.
Taxa that need additional identifiers most (in Europe) from my experience would be Poaceae, Epilobium, Staphynilidae, Diptera, and Hymenoptera, though the latter two are generally very hard, often impossible to ID to species from photos. ( So, I really apprecieate all the bee-IDs you do for me, @spiphany, thank you! I really struggle to tell most of them apart myself. :D )
Thanks! Super useful. Still getting the hang of composing useful URLs.
I’m one of the folks recently taking to moth identification in Costa Rica. I’d be happy to do IDs but all my observations are identified through picture matching, which means I’m placing my faith in a number of observations that were also made through picture matching. I’m not really sure that is what people are looking for. I’ve also seen some ‘species’ on iNat that actually consist of 2 to 3 different species IRL, all of which have confirming IDs. I’m not really sure what to do with those other than add mine to the mix and hope someone comes along later to sort it out.
Welcome to the forum! If there are multiple taxa in a pic (which happens often), IDers should focus on the one IDed by the observer. If this is unclear (like the observer added no ID at all), then it often defaults to the one first IDed by someone else. If there’s confusion, polite comments and questions can ask the observer what they are focusing on and help IDers choose a consistent focus.