As always, we welcome suggestions and feedback on the project as we continue trying to improve the site and make it easier for ecologists and members of the public to learn what different organisms eat.
Huge thanks of course to iNaturalist, without which this project would obviously not be possible! And thanks as well to the hundreds of volunteers who have contributed to our project on iNaturalist. Lastly, thanks to @scottveirs , @blakesito, @schoenitz , @terrapinjoe, and @magdastlucia for allowing us permission to publish their amazing interaction photos for one of our figures.
This community is so amazing, and we’re so excited to continue improving Who Eats Whom. And if you aren’t yet a participant in Who Eats Whom, please consider joining our project and submitting your feeding interaction photos!
I notice that this is a Traditional Project requiring the manual upload of observations. I joined the project. When I click on “Add Observations”, it brings up the old standard observation entry page. I haven’t dealt with Traditional Projects like this in awhile. I want to add several of my existing observations (which have had the requisite eaten/prey Observation Field filled out) but I can’t figure out the pathway to do that.
The forum link appears to be dead. At any rate, I can’t add a comment. I assume my photos of birds eating at my bird feeders and bugs eating my cultivated native plants are not wanted.
I just tried to add a few observations manually to the iNat project but the Terms & Rules are apparently at odds with the actual requirememts. This observation has the “ID meant for “eater” or organism being eaten?” Observation Field filled out but not the “Is observation one of these special types of feeding?” field. The project Terms & Rules indicate that only one or the other of these is required (this one “or” that one), but the observation failed to be added because it did not also have that second Observation Field.
I’m not sure I can edit the terms you reference here (not seeing the option on my end). I agree they are confusing/no longer very relevant. But the basic protocol is you use the observation field to indicate if the observation is for the “eater” or the “organism being eaten”. And then you reference the “partner” observation using the observation field for “URL for partner observation.” And then indicate, lastly, if the interaction is a “special” type of feeding interaction like parasitism.
I’ve observed a bee stealing nectar from a Hosta. I think that, if both are identified at least twice to species (both are now at genus) and at least one (the bee) is wild, the interaction should be included. I have observed a roadside Hosta that is most likely wild.
I don’t think that’s true. As I understand it, Bradley is talking about adding an existing observation to the project. That’s reachable on each (existing) observation page:
Thanks. Now I’m seeing the pop-up window when adding an existing observation to the project.
With great respect, for me personally, that is a tedious form to fill out just to add an observation to a project. I think the project is fascinating–and of very broad scope–so I hope it will get a lot of traction, but I think my time is better spent uploading other/more observations.
I think that’s a fair point; future versions of the site won’t be restricted to research-grade (i.e. IDed to species) but users will be able to toggle a switch for “RG only.” On our to-do list!
We just lumped all “small things” together for now. It’s imperfect but the interface would get cluttered with too many options/colors. Open to other suggestions though.
Understandable! If you have an observation for both the eater and the organism being eaten it should only take a few seconds to copy/paste the URLs to the corresponding fields. But I agree it’s a little tedious. The benefit of this approach is that by linking the two observations together, the community IDs can be updated in real time as the iNat community provides IDs. If we just had a single field for “what was the organism eating” we would be relying on the individual user (and not the whole iNat community) to provide the ID, which is less robust/more prone to errors.
Have you considered automatically adding observations tagged with the different “interaction->…” fields?
You could also filter for those having “associated observation” tagged as well.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires observers to create an observation of both organisms every single time. The observer may often feel this is undesirable, because it would require them to make a lot of observations that they would not otherwise want to post. For example, I observe a lot of flower visitors. I prefer not to make observations for cultivated plants (e.g., in botanical gardens). I also prefer not to make dozens of observations of the same plant species at a particular site – i.e., if I see a bee visiting alfalfa and then 10 meters away I see a beetle eating alfalfa, I would have to document and make a separate observation of each alfalfa in order to ensure that the ID assigned to the specific plant being visited is correct in both cases.
Other users can edit the values assigned to observation fields. They are less easily searchable but can nevertheless be checked and corrected (assuming that the observation media include enough detail to identify the second organism in the interaction).
To be honest the requirement that an observation be created for both organisms is a deal breaker for me and it is the reason I have never considered participating in your project.
Automatically adding observations to the iNaturalist project would presumably require using some kind of external script, because:
Observations cannot be added automatically to traditional projects (the current project is a traditional project – observations must be added manually).
Collection projects are essentially saved searches of observations meeting specific criteria (i.e. observations are automatically included) – but there is currently no option that I can find to use observation fields as a criteria for collection projects.
