I feel like I’ve done a little of both in the past and curious if there’s a right way to do it. It would be great if the annotations included an option to note a mated pair, especially in cases where there isn’t any obvious sexual dimorphism between them
Hi jaredad there are projects such as Mating pair, and there is also the Observation Field - ‘Behavior: mating’.
I myself have mostly chosen to upload the observation as the less common or more phenologically restricted of the two sexes, which for hymenoptera is often the male.
Do people normally upload more individuals from the same species found at the same site? I wouldn’t upload a bird flock bird-by-bird - maybe unless I am looking for a possible vagrant and hope that I have missed the ID among the common species.
I only duplicate observations if more than one species is included.
I believe it is up to you. An observation is only supposed to be focused on one single individual; this of course is often not possible and normally it is treated as if it is for one individual among two or many. You can then technically (if we are talking about a mating pair) duplicate the obs for the other individual (especially if the situation is what @apusaffinis described). You could also (like with a flock of birds) duplicate the obs as many times as there are birds in the photo, but that is very impractical. All in all, it is up to you how many obs you make when you have a photo with multiple individuals (within reason).
And a disclaimer: I do not profess to be an expert on this issue and do not know the official guidelines for this; the above method is just what I have always done. Could someone with more knowledge confirm?
Lots of people do. It’s not unusual for dozens of the same species to be reported at a given location/date. Some people will go so far as to create multiple observations for the same individual in order to document different interactions. For example, “the butterfly is perched on plant X” followed by “the butterfly is perched on plant Y”. This is not an exaggeration. “More == Better!”
I think it’s all needless duplication that creates a lot of extra work for identifiers, but good luck convincing others of that.
Since an observation is for one individual, and annotations are at the level of an observation, there won’t be an option for mating. You can use observation fields or duplicate the observation to make one observation for each individual if you wish, but neither are required. You can see previous forum threads about this question which expand on that:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/sex-annotation-for-mating-specimens/15605
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/should-i-record-animals-in-breeding-pairs-or-separately/30663
I think it depends on the situation. As others have noted, the annotations apply to just one individual in the observation (technically, you need to state which individual the observation is for). It may or may not be useful to document a second individual (the other mating partner).
If sex can be determined, then one would need to specify which individual the observation is for and then annotate the sex accordingly. Researchers, including myself, make use of the annotations (such as sex, adult, etc), so if a mated pair observation omits those annotations, then they’re not as useful for research. If a researcher is studying variation in morphology between sexes, then posting two separate observations is valuable.
Also, sometimes mating pairs are not of the same sex. Those certainly need to be uploaded as separate observations.
If no annotations can be made (i.e. can’t determine sex), then posting more than one observation of that species at that time and location isn’t really all that useful and could be considered a waste of time (as someone mentioned). But this only applies if annotations can’t be made.
Regardless, for under-observed species it’s always valuable to document more than one individual in order to document individual variation in morphology, coloration, etc).
A little of both is fine! In terms of the rules, there’s no right way, though you should choose which individual the observation is for in either case for annotation purposes. I have also done a little of both depending on the situation and species in question. iNaturalist’s goal is to allow people to connect to nature, and however you want to do that within the rules is fine.
As mentioned by @apusaffinis there are various projects you can submit them to, some of which are more serious than others. Some others I know of are the much broader Animals during copulation/mating, and the arthropod-specific Frolicking Flies, Mating Moths, Mating Beetles, and Odonata in Copula.
I do it from time to time, especially if I think the behavior is cool or interesting, or if the sexes are pretty dimorphous and it makes sense to have annotations for each one.
If you ARE using annotations, you might want to take into account the fact that although annotations can be downvoted, they cannot be corrected. Somebody has to contact the observer and convince them to change the annotation.
My solution is to use the sex annotation because it is handy, but I also use the “sex” observation field as an “override” for instances where the sex annotation has been set incorrectly. The code I use to harvest data from iNat downloads both, and gives the observation field precedence. For my taxon/region of interest, the sex annotation isn’t set all that often unless I do it myself, but I have run across a few instances where it was set incorrectly, and I had to resort to the observation field (twice today in fact).
As it happens, whoever defined the “sex” observation field included the option of “mixed”, which is what I use to annotate cases where there are more than one sex in the observation (whether or not they are in copula). If, at some point in the future, I were to decide that I want to see all instances where there are male and female of a species in copula, I can search for all cases where I’ve set the sex field to “mixed” and I’ll have a set of observations that are mostly mated pairs.
The same problem exists with other annotations. Before I was using the sex annotation (which I only use for certain species - not worth the bother with most common species), I had the same problem with the Life Stage annotation. Weird as it may seem, some people do annotate larvae as adults. For that, I use the “Insect Life Stage” field as my override.
That’s my solution, for what it’s worth.
I have set up a project for different types of reproductive behavior with an observation field that includes mating. You may join the project or just use the observation field. The initial idea was to enable myself to find those observations especially my own. Just noticed: the project has already nine members.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/reproductive-behavior-of-animals
I’m not sure, but I know that you shouldn’t do every ant as an observation, like in this observation.
In some cases. like interspecies matings, you just have to record both 
Personally, I wish that “colony” and “mating pair” were options for observations. Perhaps I just don’t understand the reasoning behind focusing on one organism individually, in these cases; same instance (time, location) of an organism makes sense, but if the observation is of a mating pair, colony / flock / etc. of the same species, it feels unnecessary to have multiple observations for each one. Especially in the case of large groups!
That is funny, I do sometimes upload both individuals involved in a mating for the exact opposite reason. My thinking is if sexes a hard to tell apart, observations of verified sex may help to eventually figure out if it is possible at all… and outside of a mating observation especially males might hardly be recorded as such ( females maybe, if the do brood care of any kind)
I rarely do but it is definitely useful so one can be marked female and the other male for searching purposes when people are looking for photos of one sex or the other. It’s mostly just that I can’t add the same photo twice in once batch on the app so I am just too lazy to make both.