Something else, like what? Genitalia? Beak shape? Tail shape?
A. militaris is native to Mexico and southward and protected under Norma Oficial 059 which provides protections for our native species that are imperiled.
However, a lot of literature exists for species native to MX, with quite a lot of data, as do a lot of photos. You just may have to look for it in outside sources, which will be in Spanish. Here is one link to start you. These birds are also known by their common names: A. militaris also known as Guacamaya Verde. A. ambiguus is Guacamaya Verde Limón. Guacamaya is for both males and females. (Sorry if that is unusual to your ear.)
A. ambiguus is not present in Mexico. so range is one very important factor.
There are wonderful, highly qualified Identifiers working with A. militaris and perhaps you could ask them for guidance in the absence of “pictures of these macaws with a ruler and in the same light.”
I’m all for the closeup photo as a default. As an observer, if the CV suggests something and the taxon photo shows a closeup of some terminalia or a leg, I immediately know that this is something that will require some real closeups to identify. Lots of users never even go beyond the dropdown menu to place an initial ID suggestion, so placing the genitalia photo and warnings about ID challenges in a second or third photo will probably not reach the average app-user.
I’d say a taxon photo of some weird unidentifiable closeup of some anatomy is a great way to discourage someone who isn’t knowledgeable about the taxon from picking it. If someone doesn’t even know what the thing in the picture is showing, I’d say they’re very unlikely to click on that as an ID. If they do know what the picture is showing, then they already understand the ID challenges and don’t need a generic photo of the whole insect.
No matter how similar the taxon photos are of difficult-to-ID taxa, people will somehow read differences into them (based on lighting, positioning, etc.) I run into this with my students every year- I’ll show them two photos of unidentifiable species to illustrate the importance of dissection, and they’ll immediately say “but I see lots of differences”, and start listing unimportant individual variation and photograph artifacts that differentiate those two particular photos.
So I think a photo that makes a novice say “what am I even looking at” is a better discourager than a photo that just looks subtly different from others in the list. Either you understand what you’re seeing, or you shouldn’t be clicking that taxon from a dropdown list.
I’ve thought about doing this very thing for some unidentifiable moths as well- people are constantly clicking a species that the CV suggests that can’t possibly be identified from most Live Photos because the thumbnail “looks like a perfect match”- what if that thumbnail were a dissection picture instead? I bet it would dramatically reduce how many people click that thumbnail, so from a practical standpoint, I think it would be a benefit. But I know there are strong opinions that the thumbnail needs to look like the organism as a whole, even if that leads to more misidentification, so I haven’t pulled the trigger on my moth examples.
There are observers who simply select one of the CV suggestions without care whether it matches their observation. I keep finding plant observations identified as a grasshopper or a katydid, and strangely the CV indeed would identify them as those species (often from a different continent).
How about a first photo that shows the whole-body image with an inserted or side-by-side pic showing closeup of genitalia? Surely anyone photoing these flies in such detail could generate a combined pic that addresses both preferences.
I think if we care a lot about the messaging of IDs and diagnoses in images, we may want to invest in a different solution?
The weakness of the iNat taxon photos spread is that they don’t really support annotations, and certainly not detailed diagnostics, unless someone were to make an infographic and set it as the taxon image, which is unconventional. In this respect, I think the most meaningful improvement we can make to taxon pages may be to edit the linked Wikipedia pages that come up in the ‘info’ tabs – these support photos and diagrams with captions, tables, and all the other types of information that I’ve shared at https://sites.google.com/view/flyguide/ – the difference being that detailed citations are required, which is largely a good thing, and this is a more broadly accessible platform than the iNat community, which is also largely a good thing.
Thanks again to Zoology for the incredible progress on chironomids.
Granted, I think the problem with this take for me is that you are anticipating people using those thumbnail images to make “correct” identifications, versus incorrect ones that may be created by people seeing one and going “oh that looks the same, so that must be what I saw”.
Chironomids are tricky IDs as you well know. I don’t think we need any more ways to enable people into making their own IDs, because an expert should be making them to begin with. Especially because, as you mention, several species do not have observations or taxon images period. Either way you look at this, there is a carried risk of people seeing existing represented species and assuming that is what they have.
Then there’s also the issue that most people aren’t going to understand what they are looking at and why it is important. At the end of the day, the taxon images should stick to what they are used for, general overviews, and the actual nitty gritty ID should fall to people like you who are well-taught.
Also in my experience, people copy/assume IDs based on nearby observations far more often than the taxon feature image. So the taxon feature image will not affect the outcome in this circumstance.
This thread is primarily about chironomids, but this seems to be a common issue across arthropoda. Which arthropoda taxa CAN be reliably id to species from whole body photos?
A pretty decent portion. By numbers, probably a low proportion due to the vast amount of cryptic species in the world, but it is a recognizable enough portion that I don’t see need to call the entire arthropod situation into question.
Idk, people here are naming spiders, hymenoptera, orthoptera, moths, and other diptera. Thats a pretty substansial portion of arthropods. What’s the situation with crustaceans?
There are quite a bunch of spiders that can be IDed to species… and there are many that cannot (at the moment due to over-fixation on genital features in the literature). I did not put the whole spider IDing into question with my comment above
Given this vote has been up for a few days, and “Default taxon photos should be more representative of the entire organism” has over a two-thirds majority here, are we thinking it’s all clear to get new taxon photos for those taxa which have more specific feature photos as the default?
What if … instead of an undifferentiated list of 12 photos that are supposed to represent a taxon, there were at least a few slots that curators or quasi-curators reserved for photos of particular features, depending on the nature of the organism? So, for example, in the gallery for any taxon within Diptera, Photo 1 might be a whole-body adult of either sex; Photo 2, an adult female; Photo 3, an adult male; Photo 4, a close-up of wing venation; Photo 5, a larva; or whatever. For flowering plants: the whole plant, the flower, the seeds or fruit, the leaves, and so on. There might well be lots of Not Availables, but so be it.
Not really. I don’t think a 2/3 majority of 20 people is a mandate to change everything to one style, as if it were a ‘winner-takes-it-all’ matter. It just makes it clear what most people’s preference is. I don’t see why there’s harm in having a mixture. I do think it makes clear that we shouldn’t remove whole animal pictures, or strive to replace them with genitalia wherever possible.
As the system is now - anyone can alter the chosen photos, and their sequence. I think that is best.
Since I use the taxon photos for IDs (we don’t all have field guides or access to paywalled sites for all the things) - if the taxon specialist says - see the green hairs on … - then I make sure Green Hairs is in the first few - maybe using a picture directly from that newest ID.
But I would rather have 12 (random but taxon) pictures than ‘no adult female on iNat’. That in turn is an argument for annotating iNat obs.
Relevant taxon info is another reason to think twice, before changing the pictures.
This is not clear cut, and may I remind you that 5 people who have worked with this taxa that have joined in are not completely in favor of changing everything. This doesn’t mean the opinion of people who don’t work with them is not valid. But i think it’s concerning to just change everything when the people who work with this taxa generally disagree. Imagine a taxon change for ants when everybody that works and curates that group disagrees.
Yet you proceeded to change the taxa images of all the effected Chironomids. I don’t understand why you insist on making changes to this incredibly niche group? You even changed images for taxa with one observation. This is not overall going to be helpful for people and will make miss identifications more common. Already before this, the taxa without genitalia images get misidentified and incorrectly chosen far more than all the ones with genitalia combined. If I notice an uptick in miss identifications from people using the CV, in particular Chironomus crassicaudatus. I’m changing them back. I can easily see Chironomus crassicaudatus getting selected for the majority of gray Chironomus because there are no other species that pop up. Already Glyptotendipes gets misidentified on a consistent basis. I strongly believe this is because it uses the adult taxon image and looks similar to most Chironomus species. While before, the two bland Chrionomus taxa in the CV used genitalia. Because I am the sole main IDer of Chironomids worldwide, an increase in miss identifications will absolutely have an effect on me and my ability to ID. If I don’t fix them, they don’t get fixed. There’s just not really any other proactive IDers of Chironomidae on a daily basis. Come spring, I likely won’t be able to keep up with observations whether they are right or wrong.
I see you still left some pretty terrible ones. So I question what even is your goal? To make taxa images better, or just remove genitalia? There’s still tons of issues with taxa images for Chironomids I haven’t gotten around to fixing yet. Some adult images are possibly not even right for some really tricky species I haven’t gotten around to IDing.
I still just don’t understand why you want to make an edit war over such a niche group most people have never heard of or don’t even care about and when only a dozen taxa out of over 300 even had genitalia as the main taxon image. Just why? Why force your changes of what you think is “right” when I’m not even sure you care about Chironomids besides the taxa images. It’s just saddening to me. I really truly care about this groups well being on iNaturalist.
It actually makes me sad that this forum post about taxa images has gotten so much more engagement and interactions than the forum post I made announcing the start of Chironomids getting IDed and corrected. It’s like people care more about the first image than anything actually related to Chironomids.
