This is an interesting idea. Living in Cape Town, I feel like I could easily get 30+ species of fynbos in any random photo on the mountain. Maybe I should give it a go.
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managed to get 4 species in one photo at Slimbridge wetland centre,
Bewick’s swan
Tufted duck
Common pochard
Eurasian coot
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Wait, can you upload a single photo, and then add it to multiple observations? I thought you had to upload it separately each time.
I was flipping stones at a beach in NZ and took a photo of these chitons. Thanks to a friendly NZ sea life expert I was able to make observations of 8 different taxa from this one photo.
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I dislike re-using photos and avoid it for my own observations. Photos without clear subjects are confusing for me when I identify. Whereas photos with clear subjects that the observer is then re-using for another organism tend to be poor quality photos of that second (or third or fourth) organism.
(Word choice edited)
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I mean, if the observer is responsible, they can always crop the photo more closely. In cases like the mixed flocks captured by mothdragon and swampster, I think using the same photo for multiple obs is totally reasonable.
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Even when there is a note/comment clarifying which organism the observation is for?
I use iNat as a nature journal and I’m only sometimes asking for help with identification. I’d hope if people might be bothered by blurry, poor focus, far away, or otherwise difficult to see organisms they feel fully comfortable hitting “reviewed” on my observations rather than getting mad at me or something.
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Yes hitting reviewed or otherwise moving along is always good. I didn’t mean to say I’d be mad at people.
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I think the most I have from a single photo is four, though I cropped the image into separate observations to make it easier on identifiers:
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Ok, if it’s just this, then I already knew about that feature. I just didn’t realize that it used the same photo. Thanks though!
I’m not sure if it’s the most I’ve ever gotten, but the third photo in this observation of a moss also yielded three other moss observations here, here, and here.
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I think it’s also good to duplicate the observation to keep the metadata consistent (it’s an efficient workflow too, instead of reentering). An observer can always then add a cropped photo of the focal organism as the first image of the new duplicated observation.
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I’ve got a few photos with 3 or more species of turtles basking. I don’t generally iNat plants but I’m sure some of my butterfly shots (or spiders eating butterflies) could have 2-3 species of plant in them.
I have posted a recording with 8 species of frogs calling. I have lots of recordings with 5 or more frog species calling.
Probably my most “diverse” recording is this one https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/12201753.
It has 2 species of bird (Barred Owl and Wild Turkey), 4 species of frog, and a Gray Fox calling. And then there are at least two insect species calling in there as well, but I don’t usually do insect call records because I can’t ID them.
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U r most welcome to visit India, where u’ll certainly get many such instances. A normal pic (not the best or very good one) is attached herewith as evidence only, wherein u may see: (1) Medium Egrets (2) Spoonbills (3) Grey Heron, (4) Painted Stork (5) Black-headed Ibis (6) Black-necked Stork (7) Purple Heron (behind Black-necked Stork) (8) Grey-headed Swamphen (9) Red-wattled Lapwing (10) Eurasian Coot (11) Large Egret (12) Green-winged Teal (behind the Purple Heron) to name a few. There were others also in the group like Bar-headed Goose, different types of fishes they were catching etc which are not in the instant frame but are present in other frames… However, I don’t post such group pics in iNAT as it may be confusing to non-birder viewers to identify which one is what.
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Welp, back again after finding the photo. In this photo, I have 1) Common Sneezeweed, 2) Low Smartweed, 3) Slender Stinging Nettle, 4) Great Mullein, and 5) Blue Vervain.
Not too crazy compared to some here, but still something.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/220327719
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/220327677
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/95933748
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/95933746
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/220328370
I probably have a photo with more out there, but no idea right now.
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I know I just posted six entries from a photo of roadkill opossum. Most of the flying critters were unfocused, and took off when I got closer.
Cool beetles…
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I bet wild carrots or similar umbellifers would be good candidates for getting a lot of observations out of a single photo. I’ve often seen at least a dozen or so arthropods visiting a particularly popular inflorescence, and with a bit of luck one might even manage to find one where most of the visitors are colorful beetles or other insects that can be identified to species without needing photos from multiple angles. And flatish umbels are also practical for getting all the subjects in a single plane without running into issues with depth of field.
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You’re right about that! They make an excellent platform for photographing insects.
When I have an observation like your excellent photo, I will make a tightly cropped duplicate for each species, and use those as the default photo for each individual observation, because the default photo will be the thumbnail that IDers see when clicking rapidly through thousands of Obs that need IDs.
I then use the original as an additional photo in each Obs.
I don’t think having multiple species in the additional photos will trigger a negative vote for “evidence related to a single subject” in the DQA , or a request that the observation be duplicated - at least that hasn’t happened to me (yet)
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