Oh, Yes, definitely a problem finding folks who can/will ID Moths!! I love them but don’t know a great many Species…so need HELP. Am learning slowly but it would be much faster if IDs were made in a timely manner.
Depends on the way each website is set up.
Some do choose to show more info about readers.
That doesn’t ring any bells, I usually don’t make stats posts. That’s a Scott Loarie thing.
Correct, that’s not going to happen. It would have the potential to cause way too much drama, IMO, because it would create so many more opportunities to make assumptions about specific users. There could be many reasons why someone might look at an observation and no add content to it.
This is also a bit afield of the moth identifier issue.
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Diana has been advocating for this for a long time. The question is how to direct it to a wider variety of taxa. We have other threads going on about the fourth, fifth, sixth agreeing ID on an observation that is already RG; these are presumably taxa that more people want to work on, that are easier, or both. How can we promote moth identification so that it meets the two main entry criteria of:
- Interesting to work on and
- Has a realistic hope of identifying successfully?
Perhaps some of the folks here who transitioned from not knowing much about nature to regularly providing IDs can fill us in: what influenced your choice of taxa to learn to identify? Could the iNat community have done something differently to influence you in a different direction?
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I can’t claim I knew little about nature before iNat but I knew very little about moths. Why did I want to learn to identify them? Simple, I realized how little I knew, I saw so many cool moth pics on iNat, I love a puzzle, and there were a few very patient moth mentors out there. I don’t think iNat as an organization could or should have done anything differently. I don’t think iNat as a community could have nor should have done anything differently either.
I guess the TLDR is that I wanted to learn about moths and there was someone here who was willing to teach. It’s not complicated.
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The taxa where there is a lack of IDers are often taxa where significant active learning is required to become good at IDing (i.e., it is difficult to just pick it up through exposure). They may also be taxa where there is a lack of research and/or photo ID is difficult.
In other words, there will always be fewer IDers for difficult taxa than for taxa that are easier. This is pretty much inevitable.
I think it’s too bad that staff seemed to have stopped doing the monthly “identifier profiles”. I found them interesting because they often traced precisely that process of a user recognizing a need and deciding to do something to address it. I’d be curious to know whether the profiles have inspired other users to learn about the taxon in question, or empowered them to feel like they can make a difference in a different taxon that interests them.
In some cases, experienced users have put considerable time, effort, and energy into providing both resources and mentoring to assist beginning IDers in a particular taxon. I’m giving a shout-out to @matthewvosper @zdanko and @edanko here, since I know they read the forum at least occasionally and they are some of the users whose efforts I really admire in this respect. I want to emphasize that this is work – building up an IDer community doesn’t happen overnight or automatically.
In general, lowering the threshold required to get started with IDing is going to increase the likelihood that people will do so. This may be something as simple as writing a journal post that collects a list of relevant resources or outlines how to distinguish 2 or 3 species that often cause confusion and linking to it in your own IDing. Maybe most people won’t read the link or subsequently use it for IDing anything other than their own observations, but if even a few apply that knowledge, that seems like a success.
Creating an atmosphere where users are not made to feel stupid for making mistakes or failing to recognize “obvious” things is pretty important as well. I mention this because I have seen several experts with this attitude and I am fairly certain it has turned off users from even attempting to try to learn the taxon.
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I also think an important element for getting more IDing activity is addressing the other side of the equation – educating observers about how to make better observations in the first place.
If most people are posting photographs that are inadequate for ID, recruiting IDers won’t make a difference because these IDers will get discouraged.
This is a problem I encounter a lot when identifying bees. There’s a lot of interest in pollinator monitoring in the context of citizen science initiatives, but if the observers haven’t been taught how to photograph bees, you end up with dozens or hundreds of observations that don’t show the relevant details and maybe can’t even be identified to genus. It isn’t enjoyable to try to ID these sorts of observations and it makes IDing in general a frustrating experience because one has to sift through these observations to find the few that are worthwhile. It isn’t very satisfying to squint at blurry photos and not be able to tell the observer much more than, yep, it’s a bee. I imagine a lot of people would ID more if the material they had to ID were better.
Are people who are organizing bioblitzes or providing instructions on blacklighting including info not only about techniques of attracting moths, types of lights to use, etc, but also how to photograph the moths once they have been attracted?
At least for organized activities, including guidance on how to photograph moths as part of the event seems like it would be a good way to encourage more awareness – i.e., that it isn’t just a matter of setting up a blacklight and waiting for the moths to arrive and the data collected this way somehow automatically becomes useful. It is only useful if it can be used (i.e., ID’d).
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Are there a few simple obvious shots which everyone should aim for on every moth? A simple infographic with bad line drawings of a pretend moth could be really helpful for that. (I’d love to have a cheat sheet on what to photograph for different types of organisms, even just as a first approximation.)
I’d say it’s best to keep one’s own list of species that can/can’t be identified locally from photos of adults. I’m not aware of any resource that lists them all, mainly because it varies greatly by location. For example, from Pennsylvania southward, Datana drexelii and Datana major can’t be identified without dissection or larva images, because the adults are externally identical. But in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, Datana major doesn’t occur, and it’s safe to just call them all Datana drexelii. If range is completely ignored, then a huge number of moths would be unidentifiable in photos, as many North American species have externally identical Eurasian or South American counterparts. Helicoverpa zea, for example, is the only Helicoverpa in the USA and Canada in its species group, but there are species that look identical to it scattered throughout the world that are only eliminated when identifying zea by range. So a list of “species only separable by dissection or larvae” that ignores ranges would be impractical and list nearly all the species, while one that lists “species only separable by dissection or larvae” for one particular location would be very helpful, but would only really help identifiers in a very localized area. Additionally, some species have no consistent identifying features throughout their ranges, but local expertise can knowledge of particular species’ ecology at a given site can allow for identifications to be done from photos locally (for example, I can identify all the Chionodes in my yard in Pennsylvania in the field, because I’ve dissected a bunch of them to learn the local phenotypes, but I usually leave other people’s Chionodes on inat at the genus level; it’s not that they’re inherently unidentifiable, it’s just that no one at that location has worked them out yet.) As a result, it’s sort of up to everyone location-by-location to list what they can and can’t expect to identify from adult photos based on their local biota.
Two specific taxa in New England that I’d say can safely be added to such a list though are Blastobaside and Coleophora. There are many more undescribed species than described ones, most of the described ones are not pictured online anywhere, and a few of the species names on inat have just served as repositories for entire genera (all the dozens of striped Coleophora are called “cratipennella”, for example, and the research grade “Acorn Moth” observations probably represent 20+ species). Another is Clepsis peritana/penetralis- penetralis occurs throughout New England and differs from peritana in female genitalia, but nearly all of them on inat are just labeled as “peritana”. In all these cases, the identification becomes a sort of circular trend- a bunch are labeled as one species, so observers conclude that that’s the “common species” in their area, so they default to identifying theirs as that species, and now that species looks even more overwhelmingly common, etc.
As far as complete state lists go, there are surprisingly few of them available anywhere online. Here in Pennsylvania, PNHP has a good one (not available publicly though I don’t think), and our BAMONA list is very good because we have a very excellent active state reviewer. Many states are poorly covered on BAMONA though due to lack of local volunteers. Massachusetts has MassMoths, which is a good resource. New York has a very excellent list in the works by Hugh McGuinness and Jason Dombroskie, but it’s not published yet. In all cases though, micros in particular are underrepresented. And of course due to climate change, ranges are changing, sometimes dramatically and over very short time scales. Southern species are appearing in northern states all the time now, and Pennsylvania adds new southern moths to our state list every year, which often become established within a few years of their arrival.
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Your question and request will prompt me to write a long-overdue journal article on moth photography. The answers to your query are “out there” but widely scattered. My Texas mothing pals and I have been coaching individuals when the opportunity arrises (at bioblitzes, etc.) and I offer suggestions routinely in comments on observations, but that’s obviously not getting out to the wider population of moth enthusiasts. When I get that journal entry ready, I’ll post a link to it here (and probably elsewhere).
I’ll take this opportunity to point once again to a book review I did of Dave Barker’s “Moths and Mothing, Featuring The Moths of the Devils River”(@ptexis). He has an excellent chapter on moth photography.
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Thank you for all that information!
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There isn’t enough people saying this on here
Annotate them!
I can pretty well tell an adult sphinx from the other similar looking ones in my area, but I can’t tell the caterpillars and I can tell the larva of tiger moths in my area pretty well but can’t tell the adults at all. There’s so many observations of both all the time that it’s impossible to find the energy to scroll through the recent observations of either and differentiate larva and adult on top of IDing. It’s a small bit of energy compared to the ID itself, but it’s energy I have to spend on every photo that I can keep just by filling out the “With Annotation” filter and not having to worry about it
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Thanks for the tip. I just went through all my leps and did that – it was mainly the adults that needed it; I was good about annotating larvae and pupae. I also found that my older observations were already annotated; I must have gotten out of the habit at some point.
Since the Peterson guide lists only about 1500 of the 3 to 4 thousand species that can be found in northeastern North America it has some pretty severe limitations.
What works for me is to let iNat give me an initial ID, and then go to the Explore page and enter the superfamily/family that the suggestion belongs to. Selecting Species and Grid view, I scan each species looking for one that looks like the one I have. It works pretty well except for the micro-moths. MPG has been suggested to me as well and I do try it but, like you, I have great difficulty seeing the details in the pinned specimens.
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It’s just me doing them, it’s not a team effort, and I ended up not having enough time this spring to work on them, which was a bummer as I find it super fun. But I’m back on track now, with a recent profile of k8thegr8, a caterpillar identifier, and I’m hoping to have another profile up next week. Some people I’ve reached out to haven’t replied or they’ve politely turned me down, which I totally understand.
What I’d love are suggestions of people to profile! Please send me a direct message here or on iNat with suggestions. Also, nearly all of the suggestions I do get are for people in North America. Which is understandable considering the userbase is heavily biased towards NA, but I really want to feature people from all parts of the world. I’d also love to feature people who maybe just focus on a small area, or a taxon without a lot of observations, or even someone who’s not an expert but is doing what they can.
I’d definitely be interested in that too.
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Did I accidentally turn off some setting on my profile? New iNat blog entries used to be displayed on the right side of the dashboard, but I haven’t seen any for a while and apparently it is not because there haven’t been any.
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That would be wonderful. If done well, it could help to counteract the elitism that tends to creep into nearly every academic endeavor.
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No, you didn’t change anything. Basically, there are some quirks with the way announcements work. We can set announcements to only appear for users with a certain account locale, or only appear on certain network sites. And if there’s an existing announcement, a new announcment won’t also appear unless it has similar settings (eg both announcements need to be selected for the same locale). We’ve had a lot of non-blog announcements lately that were only shown to accounts with English locales, so when I made my announcements I had to also choose only English locales. Thus if your account’s locale wasn’t English, you wouldn’t see it. I’m going to play around with some of the settings and see if there’s a way around this.
There’s definiteley some of that, as there is in just about any group, but in my experience many expert identifiers on iNat are helpful or neutral. Unfortunately negative interactions are often more memorable. Regardless, I try to profile identifiers who do also take the time to help and encourage people.
Anyhoo, back to the regularly-scheduled moth identifier discussion.
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Quite normal for me: I add an id only when it does help - i.e. a finer id, a disagreeing id, or bring the observation to RG. So generally I won’t agree to “dicot” when it is already at that rank. I look at about 10 times more observations than I add ids or comments.
I also have many more Reviewed without an ID (or comment).
But if ‘many’ of us have Reviewed and moved on, maybe that obs lacks field marks ?
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