New to iNaturalist and trying to help with identifications

In my experience, the main difference between Pterygota and Insecta is that most posts in Insecta are the initial ID by the observer who wasn’t sure what kind of insect it was (or your odd bristletail/silverfish/springtail disagreement - but those are usually easy enough to resolve). Most casual users do not put things directly into Pterygota, so it usually ends up there due to disagreement as to which insect order something is in, and therefore the posts there are a bit more confusing.

I am pretty sure Pterygota has more regular sifters than Insecta. Or maybe that’s just marina_gorbunova doing the work of 10 people?? Anyway since Pterygota is also a finer taxon than Insecta I would recommend putting it there if applicable.

I could give some more tips on fast and dirty sorting insects to order but I don’t think this is the right thread. Maybe I’ll write a journal post. Bugguide has a nice visual guide but there are certain things that tend to end up stuck at high taxa that I could talk about.

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What is the current position of springtails in Inat? In reality, they are Crustacea (Insecta are Crustacea too, but Collembola sit outside Insecta, not inside). This is one of the things where I never know what to do (and even if I find out what Inat thinks, that might be corrected sometime later). Fortunately I haven’t seen springtail observations yet (the other thing is “Magnoliopsida” which is Inat’s idea of dicots, but I don’t use that anymore except for my own observations).

After having read this thread, I switched to lift unknowns to Pterygota instead of Insecta unless I’m unsure.

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Yeah, they’re in Hexapoda > Entognatha, but I see them pop up in Insecta sometimes since they are small six-legged things. Posts of them aren’t super common in general though as their size and often jumpiness makes them pretty challenging to photograph.

There’s also a surprising number of arachnids posted to Insecta. I sometimes wonder if this is a language thing, or if people forgot/never learned to count the legs?

I think there are more possible causes for mis-IDing spiders as insects

  • not even knowing that they aren’t (when I was young I knew elderly people to whom all arthropods were “insects” because they were born during or shortly after the war and spent their youth barely surviving, not studying taxonomy)
  • low-quality photographs (ladybeetle larvae and salticids look similar if all we see is the rough silhouette)
  • ant-mimicking spiders (I haven’t them encountered yet here)
  • some spiders tend to keep pairs of their legs close together (e.g. Argiope, they even look like having four legs)
  • the spider lost legs to a predator
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I think probably most non-inat type people think ‘Arachnid’ is just spiders (i.e., colloquially Arachnid <=> Araneae). I didn’t know that ticks, mites, and scorpions et al were also arachnids until I started IDing on inat.

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Haven’t seen one in life - but plenty of South African obs as I identify. Need thoughtful pictures so you can, wait, count the legs again! Also came across an ant mimicking beetle. And there’s a katydid with an ant-mimic larva. All the rules we learn, get broken, the more you identify.

Calvin and Hobbes cartoon - they’re all BUGS right? Little creatures with too many legs. And the centi / milli pede with 23? pairs of legs, and a few missing on each side !!

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I don’t even count legs for arachnids anymore, I just count body segments

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In my experience, I get most notifications within the first couple days of identifying something. It is rare that I need to bother unfollowing, because it is rare that I will keep getting notifications after more than a week or so.

Which is better than, “Well, I’m not quite sure, so I’ll just mark it reviewed and move on.”

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There seems to be a general impression that mushroom foraging takes a more esoteric level of knowledge than wild-plants foraging.

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Well, I think that’s kinda true. As a very amateur forager I feel like edible plants are much easier to find and positively identify than mushrooms. Nobody is going to mistake raspberries or garlic mustard but you see people get confused about what is and isn’t chicken of the woods all the time, and I’ve only happened across chanterelles once but edible plants seem to be everywhere.

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Also most poisonous berries taste spit-out awful, which isn’t necessarily true with mushrooms.

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I’ll be honest, i fully dont understand people who cannot recognize chicken of the woods. It takes approximately five minutes of research to know what to look for. They are so insanely distinctive but people still somehow manage to mistake Jack-o-lantern mushrooms for them despite the gills. (Specifically talking about people with even a modicum of interest in foraging here)

Yeah there are super easy plants, but there are a lot more that are as cryptic as many fungi are. Just look how many plants are in unknown

Raspberries are definitely as safe as it gets though, since in NA there are no poisonous aggregate berries (outside of like… jack in the pulpit or goldenseal, but those arent even really aggregate berries)

EDIT: Also I find chantarelles to be stupid common. I find them everwhere. Just look for old oaks on hillsides, or trail cuts, or honestly, just anywhere near an old oak.

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That is exactly correct. It’s like flipping through a bird field guide to find the one you just saw; you’ll recognize others based on flipping pages and seeing pix.

Also, I feel I have an obligation to spend time doing IDs to repay the time and effort of others who’ve done them for my obs. I’ve even sent messages to specific identifiers who seem to have expertise with certain genera or geographic areas I was traveling and iNatting. Results have been excellent with that tactic and I’ve learned so much that way.

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‘25% of IDs are made by 130 users’

I am torn between awe, with grateful thanks for all the kind hard work.
And horror that it rests on so VERY few shoulders!

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The CV has difficulty with non-cropped arthropod photos where there is a lot of background in addition to the organism in question. Its suggestions for such observations are, in my experience, often quite random indeed. E.g., things like suggesting a spider for a honeybee flying against a window. Here there is maybe a certain logic (from a CV perspective: associating spiders with a common habitat of window frames) but in other cases there seems to be no discernable reason why it would choose a particular suggestion except that it must have some photo in its training set which includes a similar combination of background elements.

The suggestions for cultivated plants can be pretty bizarre, too, if it is something that isn’t showing up in “seen nearby” because all the local observations have been correctly marked as “not wild” (or if it is a hybrid and thus not included in the CV). Again, these are cases where the CV is clearly at a loss because it isn’t finding a good match so it is valiantly trying to find something to suggest.

These are very different mistakes and wrong suggestions than those I would expect a human to make.

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CV does some wildly hilarious things with fungi sometimes and it makes me wish that it based things off of more than the first picture.

Just look at the suggestions given here - they aren’t even in the right family, let alone genus or species

though as much as I laugh at it sometimes it does a surprisingly good job. It definitely seems to handle more easily iconic genuses better, which makes some sense

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To help international newbies, I’ve made a preliminary translation of the table in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauchfuß (which I use a lot) and put it in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ralf_Muschall/Prolegtable . If I get no veto from other Wikipedia users, I intend to insert it into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleg .

I’d love to see corrections, also see my notes in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proleg or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Bauchfuß

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Not since we’ve had a lot of people not very familiar with plants putting Unknowns into Dicot/Monocot. I can look at obs IDed as Dicot and find plenty I can ID to genus or species.

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On iNat Subphylum Hexapoda includes Class Entognatha (springtails in here) and Class Insecta. Here are my springtail obs: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=49470&user_id=lappelbaum&verifiable=any

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That propblem is compounded when the person is also not very familiar with the culture and subsistence of the region. An picture of a bug on a common crop plant of a given region, posted by a user from that region. The first ID calls it “plants” or “dicots.” Whereas someone with knowledge of the region would deduce that what the observer really wanted to know is what bug was eating the crop they planted.

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