Hi everyone, I have finished a working prototype of a site that allows you to search the common name of a species and figure out what it eats, based on iNaturalist feeding observations. You can check it out here: https://whoeatswhom.org/ [Screenshot 2023-10-23 112442] My ultimate goal is to make…

This could be really useful. Looks like a huge job that has the propensity to blow out. I wish you a long life. Couple of thought bubbles. Plants get eaten by animals. Plants get eaten by plants https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-Downey/publication/263425856_An_inventory_of_host_species_…

This is awesome, but really needs to include scientific names, the requirement to use common names makes the thousands of species with no common name unsearchable EDIT: well the idea is awesome, but all it does when I hit “search” is reload itself EDIT 2: That is when it does anything, the search …

Next question: What about insects eating plants in parks or gardens? Up to now I haven’t bothered to upload the plant, because it’s casual. If the web page only uses RG observations, there will be a lot of interactions lost. Not only “pests”, but also something like those Monarch caterpillars: https…

I understand that this is just something that’s meant to interact with this particular iNaturalist project and may never go beyond that, so here are just some random thoughts. Requiring that both eater and food are represented by iNaturalist observations (and RG at that) is in my opinion an enormou…

All really useful thoughts, thanks for taking the time to share them. Defining “eat”: I honestly don’t know the right way to draw a box around this. The simplest project would just be focused on macro-animals eating things. The most inclusive, expansive project would include face microbes “eating…

All great points, thanks for your thoughts here. Requiring both partners to be IDed separately and to RG: Yes, this is absolutely a big hurdle that limits the data quantity. However, there is an existing trophic interaction database (GLOBI: https://www.globalbioticinteractions.org/ ) that uses iNa…

Oh, I think insects eating plants in parks/gardens absolutely qualify. In fact, one group of people who I think could really benefit from the database is community gardeners trying to better understand local pollinator and pest interactions in their gardens. If you just upload that same photo of the…

[image] bradleyallf: then we can get a RG observation of the plant and get the observation in the database! That was the point I was trying to make - maybe it was not clear enough. Since the plant is “captive” it won’t reach RG, but stay casual.

Next step is definitely to add scientific names! I’m sorry the search bar is horrible. One problem is that it loads names in the search bar that don’t actually have any interactions yet and so you get a blank screen. My web design skills have yet to catch up with my enthusiasm for making this projec…

Oh I see what you mean. Dang, this thread is really productive for coming up with things I didn’t think about. I’ll have to come up with a separate coding workflow for dealing with captive/cultivated. Maybe like, “if >2/3 of people agree on the ID, then include it.”

Who Eats Whom? A new site for searching iNaturalist feeding interactions

General

jasonhernandez74 October 31, 2023, 12:14am 33

Thank you for reminding us that iNaturalist does not need to be all things to all people.

Show public places that I can go to make my own observations

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Who Eats Whom? A new site for searching iNaturalist feeding interactions

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