Recently I nominated two moray eel species, Echidna awa and E. sagamiensis be added, here: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/822727 . I was told iNat uses Eschmeyer (I remember it was CoF before, what changed?) but anyways, I thought fair, lets wait till Eschmeyer’s catalogue is updated so that these 2 species get automatically uploaded. Now I recently checked Eschmeyer’s and I did find them both listed as valid, but they don’t appear to be added yet. Could someone add them or explain to me why they aren’t already automatically added?
species don’t get automatically added to iNat once they’re recognised by external authorities, they still need to be manually added here. For fishes, we use Eschmeyer’s in the sense that that’s the authority we try to follow for the names we use, not in the sense that there’s some kind of automated link between the two, and when a species/name appears in the former it also appears in the latter
It certainly used to be the case that changes in the CoF (the full name is Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes, so we are referring to the same thing) were automatically imported. I think this was done by someone on iNat staff running a script every few weeks.
I’m not sure when that stopped happening, but it hasn’t occurred for a while, I’ve added numerous species manually over the last few years