This is something that’s been on my mind more than it should for some time now and it’s been driving me kinda crazy lol, I want to try to do something about it and figure out what’s really going on here.
Essentially, there’s a genus of cockroach here in Australia, Ellipsidion. When you look at observations for them here in the south-west where I live you see two species recorded: E. humerale and E. australe. They look nearly identical as nymphs so far as I can tell, and fairly similar (though definitely distinguishable) as adults. The problem is, according to all literature I can find, E. humerale is the only one native to Western Australia, or at the very least south-western australia. E. australe is only ever mentioned as an east-coast species in all documentation outside of iNaturalist that I can find.
This is further compounded by the fact that there’s 0 observations of an adult australe in this region. Both species are winged as adults in both sexes and thus very easy to distinguish from a nymph. As far as I can tell this seems to be a runaway problem where a few people early on uploaded Ellipsidion observations as australe, and it created a feedback loop where iNaturalist now recommends that as a species found in the area, frequently before it even recommends humerale.
At the very least I have been trying to fix IDs I can very safely assume are humerale based on thorax colour, but my apprehension from taking it further is simply because I’m not a cockroach expert by any means. I just think these guys are kinda cute and I’ve been fascinated by this particular disparity. I’ve been wanting to go through and ID all australe observations in the region at the very least back to the genus level, if not E. humale, but given that’s over 100 observations I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want to look like I’m just on some IDing rampage despite a lack of credentials lol. I think I’m probably justified, but I’d love some outside perspective, especially from anyone who’s noticed a similar situation play out on iNaturalist before. As I’m sure it probably has at some point!
What I would do in this situation if I have a suspicion but low confidence about it is to do some filters on the Explore page searching for those species and figuring out who the top identifiers are. Figure out who the main people identifying E. australe are, and separately, figure out who is most likely to actually know what the situation actually is and/or how identify them accurately. Then choose an observation and tag those people and ask them for clarification.
If you receive productive comments from that, great, that will help you with further decisions. If you don’t receive any helpful comments, do some more research on your own to increase confidence and then I would start pushing IDs back on a small scale to see if you get any feedback. I was just doing this yesterday - I’m pretty sure two commonly identified mouse species in my area aren’t actually identifiable, so I identified maybe 50 observations and waited to see if I’d get any comments back from those. E.g. in this observation there was an opportunity for the previous identifier to push back and they opted not to. Maybe today I’ll do another 50 and then tomorrow do a hundred or two hundred observations and see. If I were more confident or had received clear direction from more experienced people with a particular species, then I would just go ahead and push as many back as I can right away.
I fix these all the time. In fact, I joined to fix misids, not to observe!
You can disagree, even provide reasoning if necessary.
I’ve discussed before, that we should have the ability to flag cvm when it repeatedly misidentifies unrelated stuff. Pyrilla and Dictyopharidae, Ugyops is suggested for almost any planthopper. nevermind. And also let us flag the geomodel!
sabutaro is the leading identifier, and is active on iNat. Ask them ?
@thebeachcomber is also on that leaderboard (and active on the Forum too)
Please do push back on the errors. Write an explanation (nymphs of these two not distinguishable though adults usually are, maybe adding that you appreciate the posting of these obscure insects, keep it up). Apply this copy-paste to the observations and you teach not only this observer but also others who visit the observation.
In addition to what Barbara shared, please consider crafting a Journal post explaining the situation, which you can then link to. This also lets you include illustrations and a more thorough explanation.
Thanks all for the replies! I figured I’d be in the right to, I just hate being presumptuous, especially outside my field of expertise. Some good tips in here I hadn’t considered too ^-^
I prefer to engage in similar situations.
Looking at Leucobryum moss observations of the area I just visited, I was surprised to find half identified to the CV suggested taxon that I haven’t seen a single instance of in two weeks. The taxa I’ve seen only had a handful of observations each in the set. For the observations I thought were incorrect, I left a comment stating that it is a different moss and some reasons why.
I had a discussion with a local identifier, also a non-expert for the genus, and he withdrew his confirmations. After that, observers started updating their identification either to genus level or to the taxa I suggested. Starting with 77 obs of the AI suggested taxa, it went down to 17. I only had to push back on half a dozen. Observations of taxa not in the CV model almost doubled.
If you have a comprehensive list of cockroaches for the area that omits E australe, you could quote that and back up with no adult sightings.
It is up to you to start with a comment or just push back. Either way, a compelling short message will make it stick.
If you haven’t gone on your ID rampage yet, you absolutely should! If you’ve done the work of checking the published literature, and can cite that someone has reviewed the species of your area and found only the one species of Ellipsidion , that’s all the credentials that are necessary. And if the two species are easily separated as adults, and the iNat observations show reports of nymphs of both species but adults of only one, the people reporting nymphs of the other species are pretty clearly wrong and need to know it.
I’ve spent most of today on ID rampages, I think all with regards to small heteropterans, mainly in the genera Orius and Nysius; I just purged Europe of more than 150 spurious O. insidiosus records, and countered probably another 100 or so records of N. vinitor, N. caledoniae, and I forget now what all else. Maybe someday iNat will add some sort of quality control at the upload stage; but until that happens, for iNat’s data to have any scientific value, literature-informed ID rampages are going to be absolutely essential.
Somewhat recently, myself and other Collembola enthusiasts have done this with a few species on the west coast of NA. Due to an initial mix up in identification without proper microscopic verification, three species essentially had their names shuffled around, and several thousand observations had to be manually reviewed and corrected.
As a more global example, the littoral species Anurida maritima used to be the predominant species every dark colored coasted springtail was identified as. Per examination of specimens across both coasts of NA and and a few specimens from the UK/France, we’ve determined that most of anything identified as A. maritima is identified incorrectly, and have since massively restricted its true range in NA with Europe soon to follow.
This all came from us hobbyists questioning the status quo. If you think you’re onto something, talk to some other people who might be in the know, see if you can form some kind of consensus