As you can see at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33726122, I’ve IDed this observation to species 3 separate times and each time my ID has reverted to a genus ID. I’m 100% sure of the species ID (regardless of the taxon split), but I can’t get it to stick. It’s also worrying that the total number of IDs for Carolina mantis (which is a very common insect in the U.S.) is currently 84. Is this some kind of botched taxon split that keeps getting reapplied? Not sure what’s going on exactly.
Regarding the taxon split itself, the new species that was split off from Stagmomantis carolina only occurs in the southern U.S., midwest, and Mexico, so it should never have affected Stagmomantis carolina observations in Pennsylvania.
Is this something that we can help fix? Like is this something that would be “rolled back” and re-implemented better, or is the best course of action to go through and help ID to species level? After reading the paper I’m willing to help ID, especially in the places where the range of the species doesn’t overlap.
I agree with @jnstuart that this was most likely a momentary glitch arising from the fact that the two split taxa have not been atlased (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes?taxon_id=119989). Since your original post, the number of RG observations of S. carolina has increased. I was able to add an ID to the OP’s observation and add a S. conspurcata ID to one of my own observations. I don’t know much about the atlasing process on iNat, but I assume this problem will be largely resolved as the two taxa are atlased and observations are re-assigned to their proper species level.
Unfortunately the atlases need to have been created before the taxon split went through. No IDs will be affected if atlases are created at this point in time.
That’s unfortunate as I think there were about 20,000 Stagmomantis carolina observations to start with. Would it be worth re-merging the taxons, altasing them, and them re-spliting?
Most of the observations have been bumped to genus, so I don’t think it’s that simple unfortunately. That would also lead to an even messier set of identifications on everyone’s observations.
Ideally the taxon split could be cleanly reverted, the output taxa atlased, and re-split. Though also, I haven’t read the paper.
That ship has sailed I think; lots of IDs have been made since the problematic taxon split. @loarie@kueda is it still possible to reverse, atlas, and redo, if appropriate?
@bouteloua, reverting will delete all the identifications that were automatically added by the split. In the obs @zygy cited in the OP, that means the comments by people wondering what the heck is going on will remain, but what they were commenting about will be deleted. It looks to me like most records have been manually re-identified anyway. Do you still want to revert the change?