In the spirit of the ongoing thread about Observations “hiding” in other observations, and knowing that probably most of us have given (or received) comments encouraging us to duplicate an observation for a second species visible in it, what is the most observations you have gotten from one photo?
To my knowledge, my record is three. I’ve only visited the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia once, and didn’t know about iNaturalist then, so I only took a few pictures. Posting them to iNaturalist retroactively, I wanted to leverage them as much as possible. I present to you this picture:
Not the best quality or most visually appealing picture; but here we have a Blue Dasher perched on a red maple which is parasitized by dodder. Three species in one picture – and yes, I duplicated it to create an observation for each, as the three links indicate.
So how 'bout the rest of you? What is the largest number of observations you have gotten out of just one photo?
My highest is probably 3 or 4. Yes, at least 4 for a Bullfrog with 3 kinds of duckweed on its skin. I think we shouldn’t look for more. Some people post their one photo for every little organism and I for, one, don’t like searching for the tiny picture of species #6. I’ll just move on instead of trying to ID them.
if you’ve licensed your photos, you can get this from the AWS open datasetphotos metadata file. based on an April 2021 copy that I have, the photo that was tied to the most of your observations at the time is: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/22958149. (the one you noted was only 6th on the list.)
just for completeness, your top photo was 15th in the entire April 2021 AWS open dataset. below are the top 14. not sure what’s going on with a few of them:
I took this photo in the Philippines back in 2018. If I could go back in time, I would definitely photograph each one individually with a lot of different angles and such. But for now, I can at least try identifying some of the shells in this poor photo. I count at least 17 somewhat identifiable species. I don’t know how to identify most of the gastropods so I just have them labeled as “gastropod sp.”
OK, that’s impressive, in particular for the fact that the photo resolution was crisp enough to pick everything out.
My best effort is 5 butterfly species at a seep in Zimbabwe and you really had to squint to see the ID for a couple of them. Personally, I blame the camera. Or maybe the lens.
I find one of the most satisfying feelings while ID’ing observations is being able to recognize a handful of other species in the photo, even though they’re not what’s being ID’d - I feel like such a wizard, even though my knowledge is really pretty limited.
I’ve never submitted a duplicate observation (although I’ve encouraged others to) - I should go back through my old photos and see if anything is worth (re)submitting!
When I look through compost, I sometimes take a random photo and then zoom in later - numerous observations in a very small area! But I never use the full photo, just crop and upload some of the little creatures.
