(Apologies if I’ve posted in the wrong place, first time using the forums)
Hello everyone!
I often go through observations to annotate them, and while it might seem irrelevant I prefer adding “cannot be determined” on the sex annotation when it applies as opposed to leaving it blank (it seems to be the one annotation left blank most often that I’ve seen, for some reason), especially since there’s a graph for sex on the species pages.
Issue is, I do this mostly with felines - and with domestic cats, the very vast majority of tortoiseshells and calicos are female. The only male cats with both red and black in their coats are intersex, chimeras, or mutations of sorts.
How do I annotate this? Do I assume they’re female as it’s a sex-linked trait, or do I annotate it as “cannot be determined” just in case it’s an exception?
Thanks for helping!
In cats most of the time you can guess the sex just by habitus alone, if genetically it can only be a female in 99,99% cases, there’s no real reason to annotate it not as female.
that sounds like a case where you should mark as female. you may get very rare cases with other animals, like birds, where the biological sex doesn’t correspond with the outward appearance but it’s rare enough it doesn’t seem worthy of worrying about here. You can’t genetically test any feral cat, cardinal, etc you see.
Theoretically any animal with visual sexual dimorphism could actually be intersex. It’s rare enough to not matter.
Not directly related to the initial question, but nevertheless…
It’s so frustrating when someone added “cannot be determined” already, when it is actually possible to determine, and you cannot add the sex… So I would say it’s better to leave it blank. In my view, that “cannot be determined” option is most useless.
I find that “cannot be determined” option useful so I can distinguish between observations that haven’t been annotated and ones where the sex (or alive/dead) is not obvious. HOWEVER, iNaturalist should change how we deal with disagreements for annotations!
Right, it should be the same as for IDs. Then “cannot be determined” option will be rather useful. And other possible mistakes in annotations could also be corrected via voting system.
Thanks for the advice everyone!
I do agree that there should be a better way of disagreeing with annotations, and I’m completely open to deleting the annotation if told to do so.
And to the user saying to leave it blank, don’t worry, I only annotate as “cannot be determined” for animals I’m aware have no or extremely minimal (such that it can’t be determined from a picture) sexual dimorphism! I appreciate your concern though, I’m sure that could be a problem given how wrong annotations are currently dealt with
I suspect many of us just don’t have the confidnce in most cases. Some are very tough; plants for instance.
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