I found your profile on iNat itself and can see you live in the northeastern U.S. I live in Massachusetts and I use this method of IDing moths, with really pretty good results (which are not due to my personal knowledge!): When I upload photos to the website, I see what iNat suggests for an ID - the ones that iNat is “pretty sure” about. Then I look that up in Beadle and Leckie. If I think the suggested ID is correct, I go with that. Otherwise, I go up to the genus or family or, if I’m really stumped, Lepidoptera. My guess at how accurate iNat’s suggestions are is in the range of 75% correct, maybe more. I find this faster than endless paging through the field guide or endless clicking on BugGuide or Moth Photographers Group.
It seems pretty normal to me. Many of my naturalist/scientist friends don’t have the time or interest to make IDs on iNat.
I hadn’t read it as being specific to iNat. I took it to mean going four years without learning how to identify organisms; e.g. four years of appreciating wildflowers and they are all still just “pretty flowers.” Sorry if I misconstrued the meaning.
I am a generalist - I pull from Unknown as best I can - and watch my notifications roll in. And I ID for the Cape Peninsula, where I can hope to recognise stuff. There are a lot of taxon specialists with filters set … they wait …
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet but needs to be - a lot of moth identifiers are physically exhausted by this point in the season. Summer is our busy time (at least in northern hemisphere/ cold winter areas). Many of us exist in a state of perpetual sleep deprivation during the summer months. It makes keeping up with the flood of observations difficult, especially with mass uploads from bioblitzes and lighting events.
I am not sure what to suggest as a solution, except maybe to have a push for mass-identify blitzes in winter when we are less busy. That is not the ideal solution obviously, because people prefer to have instant feedback these days, not wait months for an ID. But realistically, it is very difficult for moth-ers to do tons of IDs in the summertime. We are walking zombies!
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I am fortunate to live in one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. I started my personal moth ‘bug blitz’ to see if I could account for 20% of the 10,000 estimated moth species in Costa Rica. I was amazed that one night, after 3 months of non-stop bug lighting, I was able to find 30 new species I had not seen/noticed before.
You are welcome to pitch in and work on IDs. My non-species sightings are here. LostInCR’s non-species moth list
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I spent a little time going through your CR offerings. Hope it was of some help.
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Thank you. I had more IDs tonight than in the last month!
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which is why we need to encourage more iNatters to add more IDs where they are competent. To spread the burden wide - so the specialist can concentrate on - here are a bunch of your preferred family … We should not expect specialists to plod thru the whole catastrophe.
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It may be a big ask to do this much IDing if it is specialist IDIng or ID to species level in difficult groups that require a lot of time/effort. But you can also target your IDing to easier groups or more general IDs which are easier to make. These can go quite quickly using the Identify modal, if you can pick a little subset of iNat that needs the ID help and develop familiarity with it, IDs are actually much quicker to make than observations in many cases.
For instance, 95% of my IDs are in one genus in the US (Anolis) which is also one of the most observed (100,000s of observations). But I can average maybe 7 sec/ID, so I can help out on this volume quite a bit. As it stands, I have about a 98:1 ID:observation ratio (with 1500ish observations), so everyone chipping in with what IDs they can do definitely helps!
IDing is also a great “interstitial” activity - have 3 min you don’t know what to do with? Knock out 10-15 IDs from your favorite ID link real quick. It’s fun!
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Since your original response was to me, I will clarify further:
Four decades of identifying wildflowers (from stacks of books, long before we could look things up on the internet.)
Four years of posting on iNaturalist, carefully photographing and identifying my own observations, usually down to species (or genus for the tricky ones.)
But (so far) only four months of IDing other people’s observations, by poring over them as carefully as my own.
And still, after all those decades, I get excited every time I find something new, and I just have to know what it is, even if it’s so small and inconspicuous that most people wouldn’t notice it. Because it’s never just another pretty flower.
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Yes, I do most of my identications at unknown/order/family level, to make the observations more visible for the experts. My interest lies with insects and spiders, and especially where I live, there are so many undescribed species and so many that can only be identified to even genus level sometimes under a microscope. I respect that and do not want to guess just for the sake of making identifications. I do my best though to help during challenges and bioblitzes where there are more to do for non-experts like me!
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Unknown to spider is an ID. Every little helps.
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Yes! I was going to suggest that people who think IDing is too hard or takes too much time should just look at “Unknowns” in their town, state, area, and give them the best ID they can, even if just “Fungi”, “Birds”, “Insects” etc. I’m sure they could rack up a lot of IDs quite quickly.
I have set myself a minimum of 30 IDs a day - and I usually have all 30 done by breakfast. It doesn’t take much effort to type “fu” on all the unknown fungi observations while drinking a cuppa. (“fu” is all you have to type for “Fungi including lichens” to appear for you to click on it. It might also stand for how I feel sometimes about people who do 100’s of Unknown observations.)
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I think a challenge with moths is that the “important” identification features are so variable. Sometimes you need a magnified image of the antennae, sometimes you need a ruler to get an exact size measurement, sometimes you need to see the underside, sometimes you need to see scale structure under a microscope, sometimes you need to see a profile view of the palps, sometimes you need a view of the hindwings on species that rest with their wings closed, sometimes you need to dissect out the genitalia, sometimes you just need to rear them out because all the known differences are in the larvae. And sometimes a phone camera shot of a folded up moth on a screen is fine to get all the way to subspecies. Unlike in some taxa, you can’t reasonably expect a novice looking at a sheet covered in moths to know which ones require what information to identify, nor can you expect them to get all that information from every specimen. I’ve personally reviewed every Lepidoptera observation in my home state of Pennsylvania as of April 2024, and there’s a large chunk of them that just can’t be taken to species.
Plus even here in North America, there are sooooo many Undescribed species. The interest in identifying moths has exploded much faster than the number of moth taxonomists. Genera like Coleophora and families like Blastobasidae are a mess, and even in the USA most of the species are undescribed. Moths are a unique taxon in that they seem to have a very active “birdwatching-esque” following in 2024, despite our identification and taxonomy knowledge of them being more akin to what we knew about birds in the 1600s. Yeah, there are some field guides out there, but by necessity they leave out more species than they include, because there are just way too many species for a field guide. Heck, I’ve got more moth species in my backyard in the past year than there are species of birds in the Nearctic region. What might seem like an easy ID based on the species covered in a field guide may cause an expert to pull out their hair thinking of a dozen other lookalikes that have been overlooked in the literature. What we really need are more moth taxonomists to work out these confusing groups using DNA, rearing, and dissection, before identifiers on inat even have a shot with them.
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"Here are all verifiable Lepidoptera observations with a Life Stage of Larva: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=47157&term_id=1&term_value_id=6 "
Quoted from JD More’s post at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki-part-2-of-2/18792
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Paul, I very much appreciate your identification efforts. While I am never going to be a moth expert (I won’t live that long!), I’d like to get better at making moth IDs myself. I figure a good first step is learning what species might be confused with each other.
So, where would you recommend I look to find relatively complete, relatively up-to-date lists of what moths are known from my area, which happens to be New England? I’m happy with either print or digital resources, and if you had the time to point to such resources for other areas, I’m sure other identifiers would be very happy as well.
When someone kindly makes a comment on my observations that Species A can’t be distinguished from Species B without genital dissection and thus my observation of an intact adult can’t be IDed to better than genus, I am happy with that, mostly remember to mark it “As Good As Can Be,” and make a note to that effect in my field guide. But is there a list somewhere of such species, or shall I just try to keep making notes in my Beadle and Leckie guide?
Finally, are there any other moth ID hints you’d like to pass along? Thanks so much!
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Whereas if they don’t comment, you never know whether they even saw it.
I would like Seen By to be visible to the observer - but that won’t happen. The info is there for iNat staff to see. (If I knew Mr Audoinia had seen my obs - I would not @ mention them for help with an ID please?)
If we knew 20 people have looked at that, and silently given up - we could spend less time agonising over WHY can’t I ID that one?!
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I really dislike these kinds of stats. Some observations SHOULD be in the Needs ID state. There are any number of possible reasons. Sure, there are undoubtedly many taxa where there is a genuine backlog of observations that nobody has looked at. But I hate it when folks with little to no expertise swing by and plunk ill considered IDs onto butterfly observations for Ontario that have already been reviewed. I know, they are trying to help, but I wish there was a way I could erect a barrier that says “things are under control here - move along to some place else”. While discussing things with a fellow identifier from outside my region, I had him ask me if there was anyone going to help with the “backlog” of some 14K observations in the needs ID state. I replied that most all of them probably belong in the Needs ID state. We get circa 40K research grade observations per year, so a residue of 14K in the needs ID state is peanuts.
(yes, I know that there is the option to set the ID to “this is as good as it gets”, but I don’t like that option in most cases)
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