Sorry if this has been asked or covered elsewhere but I can’t find a definitive answer. I uploaded an observation of a pair of Mandarin ducks (in the UK so introduced originally but now breeding in the wild) but when I came to set the annotations I realised I had to set the sex and my photo showed b…

Welcome to the forum! [image] WildEdges: Should I upload the photo twice as separate observations for each gender That’s up to you, but if you want both a male and a female observation, you will need two. [image] WildEdges: I wasn’t sure if I used the same photo whether people brows…

So I have to judge if gender is worthwhile data? That’s useful to know for future photography anyway and I’ll probably err on the side of caution and assume it might be useful to someone. In this case the female wasn’t easy to photograph and a cropped photo would have made her hard to identify, but …

@jwidness pretty much covered it, but I think you should also take into account how much effort you want to put into making annotated observations. Have at it if you’re fine with making multiple observations off of a single picture. Some people will take a photo of something like ten male mallards (…

You can actually find a lot of similar discussions if you search forum for sex annotations, pairs, etc. If people will think it’s a duplicate it’d be a lesser evil, more likely someone can flag it as duplicate, so writing description is absolutely needed in such cases where you use one same photo tw…

You can prepare two photos with male and female signs on it.

I generally upload one photo in the uploader then duplicate it (so only one photo is in the iNat database). In the description, you can say which individual the observation is for and add the proper Sex annotations if you want. Either way, I wouldn’t stress over it.

Following @prokhozhyj 's comment you could make two separate entries with a note saying female (with a red line pointing to it) and that the male is in a separate photo. Then do the same for that one. As has been said, you have to judge how much effort you want to put into it. I wouldn’t do that - …

I was thinking about similar annotations with moths actually. I’ve annotated the sex on a few moths where the female is flightless so it’s clearly the male in the light trap. I was recently working on a personal project with a certain species of plant that only had about 30 observations and I fille…

If you care about having both sexes annotated, duplicate the observation and specify which individual each one is for in the Notes. Personally, I usually just add the one and skip annotating it. It’s annoying that you can’t do both in one, but not worth fighting over since it will never happen. If y…

Should I record animals in breeding pairs or separately?

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Is it ok to upload two observation for a pair of mating insects/other species? General question	13	574	October 21, 2025
Adding both male and female in annotations General question , annotations	4	234	May 16, 2024
Sex Annotation for mating specimens General	10	1376	August 23, 2020
Annotating observations that include multiple individuals General question	12	860	March 30, 2023
Different observations for different sexes General	8	475	February 25, 2022

Should I record animals in breeding pairs or separately?

Related topics