Three years ago I made a perfunctory website to search and visualize what different animals eat, based on observations submitted to the “Who Eats Whom” project. Over the past year, I have partnered with some wonderful colleagues at North Carolina State University to make some significant improvements to the site. The new site just went live earlier today and we’re excited to share it! You can explore the updated site here: www.whoeatswhom.org.
Lastly, perhaps my favorite update is a new global food web display, which allows users to see how feeding relationships connect the 1,400+ species currently in the database.
I’m really excited about where the project is going and would love to know what we can do to make it even better, and more useful to the iNaturalist community. In particular, we’d like to know:
What features you like, and
What improvements/changes/additional features you would like to see
In addition, we need more data for the project to be most accurate and useful! So if you have, or find, observations of feeding interactions, please add them to the project. Note that for your observation to appear on the site, you must upload two observations: one for the “eater” and one for the organism being eaten. You must then link those two observations using the required observation fields for The Who Eats Whom project. Lastly, both observations must be research-grade to be displayed on the site.
Thanks for taking the time to look at our website!
This is cool! I have a bunch of observations relevant to this project that I went ahead and added.
Most of the eaten organisms are difficult if not impossible to identify, but they’re cool observations anyway. All either on camera traps or a remote nest box camera. Some of the ones from the nest box camera have linked videos on youtube.
Most, if not all of them, appear to be new species to this project, too.
Maybe this project will help some of those prey observations get better IDs?
Great! This is still one of my favourite projects. It’s only a pity that cultivated plants are not included. There might be a lot interesting garden observations.
@naturalist_nate thanks for adding your observations to the project, I had a look at a few of them, so cool! Congrats on adding the first cedar waxwing and screech owl to the database. Yes, hopefully being in the project increases visibility on those observations to improve IDs.
@susanne-kasimir that is a great point about garden observations. E.g., evaluating what pollinators are visiting which plants in a garden. Hmm. There must be a way to restrict observations just to those IDed at species level, regardless of whether they are research-grade or not (since being RG precludes captive/cultivated observations). I’ll add to our to-do list to look into how we might do this.
I have a question about something that may be a bit of an edge case. Melampyrum lineare is a widespread hemiparasitic plant in my area. However, tracing its haustoria with certainty to the host plant is challenging (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/23305921 ), and most land owners/land stewards are not going to approve of the kind of digging required to trace them. In some cases, when an individual Melampyrum lineare is within, say, 25cm of the base of a tree, you can sort of assume that it’s hemi-parasitic on that tree, although even then you can’t be sure without tracing the haustoria.
So, two questions. Is hemiparasitism included in your project? And, what’s the standard for evidence, as to whether the presumed host is actually being parasitized?
Ah, a nice example for why automatically dumping observations of cultivated and otherwise not wild species into the “casual” bucket where they are relegated to oblivion imposes unnecessary restrictions. Makes it harder to document interactions between those species and wild organisms in a project like this. Such as an indoor/outdoor pet cat preying upon birds/rodents/lizards, domestic cattle being preyed upon by a cougar, deer eating garden plants, etc.
Are you taking in data automatically from iNat’s ‘Predator’ and ‘Prey’ projects? I’ve been feeding material into both of those projects for some years, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
So, two questions. Is hemiparasitism included in your project? And, what’s the standard for evidence, as to whether the presumed host is actually being parasitized?
@danlharp Love it, yes there are so many edge cases to consider with feeding relationships, I should just start a Google Doc to track these and how we want to deal with each of them (e.g. ant-aphid trophobiosis, fungal blights on leaves, etc.). Short, theoretical answer is yes, I think hemiparasitism counts as in the spirit of the project (you can tag it as “parasitism” in the observation fields). But in practice I’m guessing it’s going to be rather difficult to get many observations where, as you point out, we can be certain “whose roots are whose,” and then get that across in a few photos. But you’re welcome to try! At some point I want to add some validation layer to all these data where curators review/confirm interactions as having sufficient evidence or not, and then add a way to toggle on/off a filter for “confirmed records only’‘ on the website. Still not sure the best way to do that but that would be a process where we would create some protocols for what is meant by “sufficient evidence.”
Are you taking in data automatically from iNat’s ‘Predator’ and ‘Prey’ projects? I’ve been feeding material into both of those projects for some years, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
@arnim unfortunately, we don’t currently have a way to bring in observations from those other two projects. The only data we can ingest are from the Who Eats Whom project, which has the observation fields we need to link “partner” observations together. That said, one great way to help the project would be to add observations from the “Predator” and “Prey” projects to “Who Eats Whom” as well.
This Cyanopica cooki eating the fruits of Melia azedarach, an exotic tree planted in a garden I found rather interesting. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/336846305 and put it into the project, but as the tree is casual it didn’t get into the database.
Indeed. There are other parasitic plants in my area that are much easier to document, so I can still have fun. And hope to see the Google Doc you mention – maybe linked to from your website.
This Cyanopica cooki eating the fruits of Melia azedarach, an exotic tree planted in a garden I found rather interesting. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/336846305 and put it into the project, but as the tree is casual it didn’t get into the database.
Fantastic. Yes, we definitely want these kinds of observations in the project. I’ll make it a priority to make this change.
To me the right answer smells like putting in a bridge to utilise what has a longer history with a larger audience, rather than bandaiding that material across to a new project. Then both coexist constructively at low cost. I’m not in an immediate position to do so, but maybe in time. Or else someone else gets there first.
Agree with Arnim, that sounds off. You should be able to download from any project - much easier than asking others to go back and add stuff. Having said that, I did add my three observations that meet the criteria. Great project!
Another long-standing challenge with the site is duplicative and overlapping field names, so you may want to look out for other fields that are filled in with the correct data. Your project field of “ID meant for “eater” or organism being eaten?” covers the same ground as the existing fields “Interaction->Preyed upon by:” and “Interaction->Preyed on:”. See the overlap here https://inaturalist.ca/observations/2700865
I took the time to add your fields to experiment, but the existing fields already got the observations to
Something I’ve noticed is that the search function seems to be going by common names rather than (or as well as?) the taxa you input. For example, I select “who eats: hummingbirds (Trochilidae)” and what shows is a hummingbird hawkmoth being eaten.
This is really cool! The network graph in particular is a great addition. I think it would be nice to be able to sort by the “special types of feeding” that we tag in the “Observation field” when adding to the project.
I do agree there is something strange going on with the search function, because when I search for “flowering plants” there are no entries, there are entries that pop up when you look under the plant umbrella that are definitely angiosperms
(e.g. ant-aphid trophobiosis, fungal blights on leaves, etc.). Short, theoretical answer is yes, I think hemiparasitism counts as in the spirit of the project (you can tag it as “parasitism” in the observation fields). But in practice I’m guessing it’s going to be rather difficult to get many observations where, as you point out, we can be certain “whose roots are whose,” and then get that across in a few photos. But you’re welcome to try! At some point I want to add some validation layer to all these data where curators review/confirm interactions as having sufficient evidence or not, and then add a way to toggle on/off a filter for “confirmed records only’‘ on the website. Still not sure the best way to do that but that would be a process where we would create some protocols for what is meant by “sufficient evidence.”
