I disagree about diseases viruses and lichen being niche (: . as a former plant pathologist , they are important to me. also with lichens, they are ubiquitous and an important indicator organism
TLDR: polydnaviruses aren’t viruses, they’re a subset of genes in the nuclear genome of microgastroid and some ichneumonid wasps.
One of the things that got me to write this post is this fact …
I’m not aware of any scientific name (thus any taxon entry) that modern-day chloroplasts or mitochondria could be observed under on iNaturalist, unless it’s an extremely high rank such as Chlorophyta that would never be eligible for export to any external “research-grade” database (per Kyle’s “Alphaproteobacteria in every eukaryote” example), so (fortunately?) this shouldn’t be an issue.
The reason it won’t happen is because it would violate the policy against machine generated content.
Good point!
I post galls all the time. I almost never see the actual galling organism, just evidence of their presence.
If it’s alive (or was alive), to me it’s totally fine to post. It might not be super helpful, but I’ve seen way worse uses of iNat 
I think this is a good argument against having these particular entities as organism observations. However, in a case where an actual virus is known to obligatorily occur on another organism, I don’t see a problem with making an observation for it. Is it “useful data”? Probably not. But useful data isn’t the main goal of iNat.
Totally agree, @kyleparks. Well said!