…humans.
They’re so…human.
Does anyone know if ring bill gulls sometimes don’t have rings but instead have dark tipped bills?
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I think juveniles do, yes. Like this one I observed playing with a stick.
https://inaturalist.ca/observations/112909348
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Thank you, Kat. Your response and concern is greatly appreciated and reminds me that iNat is a community. Yes, I am still affected but I am enjoying getting back into the fields and making observations again. I am also again trying my hand at art. Thanks, again, and I hope you are doing well.
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Yes. Here’s the funny thing: we have all these different words for animal sounds – lowing, bleating, barking, mewling, quacking, honking – but really, they are all the same thing: inarticulate noises. Yet animals understand each other. Meanwhile, we humans, with all of our fancy words, constantly misunderstand each other. Maybe we should go back to inarticulate noises?
@spiphany was correct that I have done a lot of complaining. She also – I suppose rightly – suggested:
Well, that is actually difficult. The irony is that tagging people to help – which is so often suggested here – feels like it is the iNaturalist equivalent of my complaining in the forums. Tagging someone feels like complaining that no one has come by on their own.
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far be it for me to to dictate what you should feel, but imo very few, if any, will interpret your tags like this. To me, tagging indicates I value/respect someone’s expertise + knowledge, and would appreciate them taking a look, with the assumption that they haven’t yet seen that record; due to the tremendous number of iNat records flooding in, it’s far easier to miss a record than it is to catch one
I used to look at literally every single Australian record that had been uploaded in a given day, but that is now simply not feasible due to how many get uploaded. So there are plenty of obs I miss, and I don’t see being tagged in them as the user complaining, I feel chuffed that they think I’m a good person to offer my thoughts!
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Thank you for the reassurance.
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I’m usually fine with being tagged. Sometimes I’m embarrassed because I don’t know what the observation is. The only time being tagged seriously bothers me is when somebody will tag me perhaps a dozen times in one day. It feels like the person is taking advantage of me, tagging me instead of thinking for himself. Tag moderately and the ones tagged won’t mind. Often we’ll be happy to be consulted.
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I have a little list of people who have snarled back - do NOT tag me.
That’s fine - I ask the other gazillion people. You have knowledge to share? You are active on iNat?
Help please?
On social media we only know what people choose to tell us about RL. Family crisis. Broken computer. Poor internet. And and and.
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What is a “CV suggestion” please? I’m new here.
Newbie iNat user here. I have 2 questions along these lines and haven’t seen answers in the many other comments on this subject:
- I made a mistake on one of my OWN observations (you can imagine my red face) of a species that I know pretty well. Then it was confirmed by an IDer and raised to “research grade” status. Should I delete the obs. and re-submit? And also let that IDer know why?
- I recently posted an obs. of an insect specimen from almost 10 years ago with dorsal and ventral photos. I stated in the obs. notes that it was ID’d by a local expert and housed in my area’s museum collection and was tested for DNA. But it was a first record for our area. An iNat IDer disagreed on species and I asked them privately why, since it was rather definitively ID’d by an expert. They said because it was rare in my state and my photos didn’t have enough detail (which I can believe). My question is, are iNat IDs determined only on the evidence (my photos) that I uploaded? Can I used the local expert’s ID as “my” ID? (As I’m writing this, I also realized that I can ask my local expert if he would look at my obs. and confirm or not, as he is also on iNat).
Thank you all for your help.
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CV is computer vision – iNat’s photo recognition software that can be used to help generate possible IDs when you submit an observation.
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No, you should just correct your own ID with comments explaining why you think the new one is the correct ID. That will knock the observation back to the highest common taxa and back to “Needs ID”. Others will help confirm/deny the ID.
iNat is a community platform, so in general, observations should be capable of being independently verified by knowledgeable community members.
From the community guidelines:
Don’t justify identifications with your credentials […] like “I am the world’s foremost expert in magical aquatic plants, so if I say it’s gillyweed, it’s gillyweed”
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Happens to me all the time, plain mistake, typo, brain fart, or bad click - just fix your past mistake by adding a new, correct ID. Then let others correct theirs, eventually, if they in turn agree it was a mistake.
Understandably, some (most?) community members follow stringent rules - after all, any ID here is only a “best guess” based on a soup of pixels and rounded coordinates: hard to trust 100% in the absence of repeated, certified, independent DNA analyses exactly consistent with recent, peer-reviewed, relevant literature. (And even so, some would still disagree due to… unfathomable reasons.)
Still, if in support of your identification you happen to have additional data beyond photos and geolocation, e.g. a recent paper asserting a new geographical occurence for a species, or some verifiable scientific/catalog record for that very specimen, or due proof of expert analyses, or whatever… it can’t hurt to mention it. Much better than the “Just trust me I am an expert yaddyyadda” case from the Community Guidelines.
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I agree with what others have said. I generally would not give an ID based on what an expert told me, unless I could validate it in some way myself.
For instance, if an expert just told me “It is Xy”. I wouldn’t ID that way on iNat (though I might note what the expert said in a comment). You especially shouldn’t do this if the expert is on iNat and likely to ID your observation (or their ID will essentially be double-counted when you and they both enter it). That said, I think it is very reasonable to tag the expert and ask them to ID.
But if the expert pointed out some characteristics, like “It is Xy because of the black mark here, and the hind legs being longer” and I can then verify those characters, I would feel good about making that “my” ID since I now know the key traits to ID.
I would also say that, if you have a link to the DNA sequence, you could post that. Other users can choose to evaluate info that isn’t in the photo per se (just like location, time, etc.) when making their identifications. Most observations will be IDed based on what the IDer can assess from the observation. So even though sometimes as observers, we know what we saw, if there isn’t evidence in the observation, then other observers may not be able to ID to the same level. Sometimes you might be able to include info in a comment or similar (I see this with observers describing flights patterns for birds for instance) that help to make an ID, even though that info isn’t in the photo itself.
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I think there are two parts of this.
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Would I have put the ID on my observation, based on the ID by an expert at the museum plus DNA evidence? Certainly. I would consider using the information from the expert or about the DNA to be usable for me, just like information I might get from looking in a field guide. I would also make a statement like you did about what kind of evidence that I had in addition to the photos.
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Would I as an identifier confirm your ID? No. Even though I would believe you that the expert ID’d the organism and the DNA match. I can’t see those things, though. I probably wouldn’t have disagreed, either, unless I had some real stake in the ID, but it’s legitimate for an IDer to disagree if the evidence isn’t there in the observation itself. That’s just how iNaturalist works, though it can be very annoying at times.
Your idea of getting the expert to ID the iNaturalist observation is a good one. If the person isn’t already on iNaturalist (many people are), it may help get them on board here.
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From time to time, I e-mail the link to some iNaturalist observation to an expert in a taxonomic group, someone who isn’t on iNaturalist (and who I can’t lure in – yet). If this consultation results in an identification, I post that, explaining who made the ID and why. I consider this legitimate. The observation gets one vote for that ID, just as would happen if that expert were a participant in iNaturalist. The process is transparent.
The same is true for your posting the photos with the ID the expert gave, based on DNA evidence, and explaining why you did that. (If you can link to a report or article that mentions your specimen, that would be even better!)
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Ah, thank you. RE: the mistaken ID on my own observation. I kept trying to edit the original observation. It took me awhile to see that I should post a new comment and put the correct ID under the tab “suggest an identification”, which then showed my original ID as “withdrawn”.
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Thank you, that is very helpful and I will follow up with the original identifier. If they have helpful comments or have published any work on this specimen, I’ll include it in my comments on the obs.
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If this was an Alaska specimen send me a message with a link to the obs, the ent collection houses all their digital records in ARCTOS and we can link that to your iNaturalist record using the “Observation Field” section. The DNA barcode would be linked through the ARCTOS record as well so that other identifiers can see that work that was done.
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I’ve started leaving more comments about what I think the species is rather than adding an ID for those cases where I’m pretty sure but not greater than 90% sure. The observer or another reviewer can use my comment to add an ID or not. It saves one from getting into arguments and having to withdraw an ID if I believe it can’t be resolved. Also, I don’t feel comfortable when the observer automatically agrees with my ID when I’m not completely sure and I believe they know less than me.
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