I like to document Galls , bacterial fungal etc. they are ided to the best of my abilities, usually based on the host and the gall characteristic.
But i often collect if i believe i can document the adult organism/s
My question is basically should the adult , that have emerged from plant material that i have already documented in an observation , merit another observation?
I’m thinking (and in the past this is what i chose) that since these are basically the same organism in different life stages, they belong in the same obs.
but , i came to wonder should they merit another observation ? especially when multiple individuals emerge, this will make observation of adults easier to find. this has come up after i observed some galls on Salvia, and in the comments, there was a suggestion to collect and rear, since the adults are not well represented in natural history collections ( I have and also deposited)
in cases where inquilines or parasites emerge i naturally document them in a different observation, but i keep thinking they might be considered captive in this case, and the main observation is for the galls … please help me choose what’s best (:
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I think, multiple observations is more useful in your case.
iNat says 1 observation = 1 encounter with an organism, “encounter” being defined by iNaturalist to mean personally seeing (or hearing) an organism at a point in time.
If you observe the same animal at two different points in time (that are reasonably far apart), then you SHOULD put make separate observations.
For galls it’s particularly useful, so that both observations can be annotated properly.
The only circumstance where you should not make separate observations is when the adult is currently emerging from the gall.
P.S.: If you have separate observations that you know are of the same organism at different points in time, you can link them using observation fields, such as Same specimen over time or Similar observation set.
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Thanks! this is indeed a good practice , and i shall use there observation field from now onwards
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There is an issue about whether the gall causer or inquilines should be casual observations if you have reared them away from the site where the gall naturally occurred. Rearing them under artificial conditions could have caused them to emerge at a different time from if they had remained in the wild.
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Yeah, this is the only point of contention I’ve encountered as well. Personally, if I bring it in and the adult ecloses within a few days, I post it as wild at the point where it was collected, but if I’ve had it indoors for months before the adult comes out, I mark it as captive if I make an adult observation. I know some folks disagree with me and would say that a strict reading of the rules indicates that even if it ecloses an hour after being collected, it’s technically captive. But from a practical standpoint, if it ecloses that quickly, it was certainly about to eclose in the wild anyway, so it’s not going to mess up anyone’s phenology data.
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Gall midge adults are a complete mess with the computer vision. The computer vision seems to know only the adults of one species so nearly every gall midge can get misidentified as it.
More adult observations would be awesome and very useful. Infact a few mass observing of some species would be good getting maybe 100 adult observations, 100+ images of the adults. This would be to help teach the computer vision other gall midges exist and not throw everything under one species.
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