Specify common names refer to juvenile/adult or male/female

How do users state in the taxonomy and list of names in various languages, if a name applies to an adult or a juvenile form of an animal ? Here is an example. In Botswana this conspicuous and abundant (after good rains) caterpillar is called monnakamongwe but this name is not applied to the adult. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259618870
Can the list of names somehow state if the name applies to the adult or a juvenile ( and also to a male or a female)

It would be great if we could write notes about vernacular names for a taxon somewhere.

As a journal post if you have a few ?

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This is a really interesting case, though I don’t see iNaturalist changing how common names work to fit it. (It would be fairly difficult to implement for a number of reasons.)

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I’ve observed a woolly bear, identified as Isabella tiger moth, which is what the adult is called.

Some male/female pairs in various languages: bull/cow, toro/vaca, yak/'bri, tayish/`ez, chamor/aton (and both Hebrew words have Arabic cognates). Then there are pairs that differ by a gender desinence, such as perro/perra and fox/vixen (fossilized in English, but German FĂĽchsin is regular).

If there’s an observation field, can you select the name based on the field?

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The iNaturalist computer vision algorithm would have to communicate with the observation field or annotation, which would be difficult to implement. (I suspect you mean annotation rather than observation field, as observation fields are user created and not standardized.)

In any case, this would mean the algorithm would be more complex and would potentially take more time to load, and it may even introduce types of identification errors (this can happen when you take an established identification software and give it additional variables to consider when suggesting a name). To top it all off, less than a quarter of observations have annotations, so we’d be experiencing the current system in 75% of cases.

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Maybe add the common name (geographically used, life-stage restricted) in the comments / notes section of the observation??

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Seems an old issue, which has been answered already. Examples also occur in other languages. Wilgenhoutrups is also a caterpillar… and it is solved by calling the butterfly also caterpillar…


I did not read carefullly… I put them as synoniems, without a reference to the stadium. You can reference the stadium in the anotations.

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English also has this to some extent, especially with farm animals – calf, lamb, foal, fawn, etc. The standard seems to be to have the “sex-neutral adult” name as the primary name, but also list other names as possible names in that language too.

The question though seems to be not about having that name become the “primary” name depending on (for example) whether it’s a juvenile or a female, but instead just have that information available in the name listing on the species page (under “taxonomy”) (correct me if I’m wrong…). I think that would be nice information to have just for informational purposes, but I feel like data on iNat is usually there for a functional purpose – e.g. the current names setup allows people to search using the alternate common names they’re more familiar with, different localizations can use their specific names, etc.

Adding information about what subset of that species a name applies to doesn’t really augment any functionality of the site, and I can’t imagine any way it could be functionally useful. For example, I think it’d be overly confusing to change the observation’s “name” based on annotations, especially as annotations can be disagreed upon, and generally a “lamb” is still considered to be a “sheep” anyway (though other languages could treat this differently.) I could be wrong, though.

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Common names on iNat are supposed to refer to the species or another taxon and don’t necessarily refer to the form of a particular individual. A Domestic Chicken on iNat can be an adult hen, a rooster, a pullet/cockerel, a chick, or an egg. I think adding names for forms would confuse the utility of the common name.

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