Evidence of presence with an empty mollusc shell? The annotations data specifically says this is not ‘Construction’ so what is it, please?
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Good question! I was wondering the same and now I just annotate “dead”. But similar to “bone” I would like to have “shell”.
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That is on the list at the dedicated thread
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627
For the thousands of seashells I’ve annotated here are the guidelines I use.
• For an empty shell: dead, adult
• For a shell with the dead organism still rotting inside: dead, organism, adult
• For a live shell: alive, organism, adult
Note that for the majority of cases the “evidence of presence” annotation remain empty.
I don’t think a “shell” annotation will be useful here because pretty much 100% of observations of shelled mollusks are going to have a shell. It’s either shell with organism or shell without organism, but you never see organism without shell and even if you did, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who could ID it. When I say organism I really mean tissue because the shell is obviously a part of the organism itself which is why the construction annotation isn’t used for shells. Shells are not an indirect evidence of organism, something the organism made but isn’t a part of itself. The shell is very much a part of the organism itself so is a direct evidence of organism and not a construction which is for indirect evidence.
Also, be sure to add any fragments to the seashell fragments project!
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There is the occasional freshwater mussel superconglutinate but there are so few observations of these that it’s not really significant
Here’s one: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/164361619
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I mark empty shells as “organism” and “dead” because the shells are part of the organism. I’d prefer to have a “shell” annotation available for molluscs as “bone” is available for vertebrates and I believe that may happen.
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I don’t remember where I saw it but I think they experimentally implemented the shell annotation and concluded it wasn’t necessary.
I might agree with a “shell only” annotation over just “shell” because “bone” is assumed to mean bone only but I don’t think people will assume shell only from just “shell”.
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I’d also agree with a “Shell only” or “Empty Shell” annotation. It doesn’t make sense to me that there isn’t a way to annotate evidence of organism for empty valves. Personally, annotating them as “Organism” doesn’t sit right with me. Just like how feathers and fur are separate annotations for other animals
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So are the bones.
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As far as I know it has never been released publicly, but I did test out a shell annotation on our test server a few years ago.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that annotations serve two main purposes on iNat: for the photo browser, and for the graphs on the taxon page. When I tested out a shell annotation, it didn’t seem to fit either of those use cases. Pretty much any photo of a shelled mollusk includes the shell, so I didn’t see a use case for filtering by shell in the taxon photo browser, and any use for taxon page charts also seemed very limited.
This is all about actual utility, not about making sure every taxon has an annotation available for it. If it was the latter, we could have hundreds of annotations. If no annotation value is a good fit for an observation, that’s fine. Just don’t add an annotation.
That being said, I’m not a malacologist. If there’s a good case to be made for adding some sort of empty shell annotation that will meet the goals I mentioned above, I’m open to it.
The difference here is that, as I mentioned above, the shell of a shelled mollusk is pretty much always viewable in every photo (yes, I know there are some exceptions for internal shelled mollusks). Whereas with vertebrates the bones are often not, and being able to search for photos of just bones is helpful if someone comes across vertebrate bones and wants to identify them.
I’m happy to be corrected, but it seems like with both feather and fur, those are cases where a) for ID it’s useful to be able to search for photos of unattached feathers and tufts of fur and b) those are things that, when they come off of an animal, don’t cause the animal to die. Those seem fundamentally different to me than a mollusk shell.
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I don’t think a shell annotation is super necessary. There are certain cases where the shell is not visible in living organisms, such as bivalve siphons or gastropods with internal shells, and it could be interesting to annotate those. But we already have a project for the former, and internal shells are not much use on their own anyway.
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I agree completely and am always trying keep that in my mindset.
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Thank you, that makes it very clear. I’ll use Dead and no evidence of presence from now on.
Happy for this to close.
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Why use “no evidence of presence”? An empty shell is evidence of an organism, even if the organism is no longer alive. That DQA makes observations casual and is meant for observations of rocks or the moon and whatnot, or cases where the organism of interest has escaped from the photo and there is also no indirect evidence of the organism (tracks, constructions, etc.)
Edit: Never mind, I guess you mean leaving the annotation for “evidence of presence” blank, not checking “no” on the DQA item for “evidence of an organism”.
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Clarify: To use no ‘Evidence of Presence’ annotation from now on. NOT the ‘No Evidence of Organism’ qualifier.
Thanks for the edit :)
Please let this topic close as it has now been answered.
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