Website seems to work for me now. But I am also having issues with the search function. Other than that, great updates, very exciting!
On another note: I would love to be able to add multiple “eaters” to one “organism being eaten”. I think these are very interesting interactions to document but the current setup only allows for one URL to be registered in the required observation field
I’ve enjoyed adding to this project since learning about it. The new features are exciting! I seem to mostly photograph birds and otters eating fishes (like your example of the Great Blue Heron, which seems to find every fish possible!) It helps me so much that there are a few purple on iNaturalist that really know the fishes and can ID to species.
Great project! Love the graph on the website.
I echo the note by others re interactions between wild and domestic organisms - I’ve got observations of pollinators visiting garden plants that I’d like to add when that functionality becomes available.
Are things like leaf mines and galls appropriate for this project, even when the organism doing the eating isn’t directly visible but their ‘sign’ (mine, gall) is identifiable to species?
great project. I just added my first observations.
Oh yes, I also have observations that would fit for that - though it’s another garden tree, which has its own issues.
Good question, I haven’t thought of that, but could contribute some observations.
I see a lot of observations with only one end being complete and the other partner observation not added. I wonder if there is an automated way using a computer program to fill in the incomplete pairs.
I am still unable to access the website but I am guessing that it’s because the site is still newly live (understandable)!
On your other note, I’d also love to be able to add multiple “organism being eaten” to one “eater”! I have a few observations of one bird eating multiple prey items - first thing that comes to mind is an osprey who caught two separate fish, but I also have a couple pictures of birds with several different invertebrates in their beak.
Hmm that’s strange, that shouldn’t be because the website was already online even before this update. Maybe try it with a different browser, it might be due to your browser settings somehow.
I hadn’t considered one ‘eater’ to multiple ‘being eaten’ ‘s yet, but great to hear there is some interest for being able to link more than one observation to another! - In identifying for this project I’ve noticed that to get around this issue some people have resorted to simply uploading the same organism multiple times and linking each observation to one other one, which technically works but is leading to unnecessary clutter on the platform.
It is also true that there are a lot of observations which are uploaded to the project without following the instructions properly, leading to obs that are not properly linked and therefore do not show up on the website. It would be wonderful to have:
but I imagine this might require more resources than are available to the project? Although, since they are currently getting filtered out somehow, it might be feasible to flag these lacking observations in some way. Any tools to make this easier or workarounds that do not require going one observation at a time would be very welcome!
Also, wanted to send out a friendly reminder that doing some identification for the ‘needs ID’ is very worthwhile for getting more pairs onto the website (since they only show up if both obs are RG)!
Looks like great fun. I am unclear on one thing, and apologies if it is covered somewhere. Say I have uploaded the preferred two obsevations:
Eater, for instance, this White-winged Scoter:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/337694352
Currently, I have this in the project as “eater”, with a link to the observation below.
Thing eaten, this sand dollar:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/337824591
Currently, I have this in the project as “organism being eaten”, with a link to the observation above of the scoter.
All good, but should I add both observations to the project, or only one, and then just provide the link? No big deal, but I don’t want to cause some sort of infinite loop!
(Edit. Punctuation, typo!)
So many great, productive suggestions and threads here, thanks all! See below for my responses:
We can definitely download from any project but the main issue is that, for the Predators project for instance, users enter in the taxonomic identification of the partner observation themselves, rather than linking to that observation. If we did that we would be relying entirely on one observer’s opinion of what was being eaten, rather than the iNat community ID for that partner observation. This isn’t a huge deal (I imagine the observer often gets it right!) but it’s less scalable than relying directly on the iNat infrastructure for community IDs of all partners in the interaction. So we built the site around the idea of linked observations where each observation is its own observation on iNat, and adding in pipelines that work a different way will be complicated (but not impossible!).
We are definitely interested in herbivory for the project! But as others point out above, our workflow currently excludes non-native plants (working on fixing that!).
Thanks for pointing that out! Yes there’s a bug with the search function where species are getting lumped together when their common names are similar. Very weird but we’re looking into it and hope to patch it soon!
Thanks @melspippin! Yes, we are definitely going to add capacity to filter by “special feeding types" in the next update (maybe some checkboxes users can toggle). You also point out another shortcoming of our current search functionality which is that you can only search at species level. Searching at coarser taxonomic levels doesn’t really work yet (but I am very excited to add that feature because it will be so cool to see these interactions at scale– “what eats snakes in North America” etc.).
We aren’t in contact with them but I love that site! You’re right that it’s doing a similar thing (and even more expansive since they are concerned with non-feeding interactions too). I see Who Eats Whom as a narrower-scoped complement that focuses specifically on iNat, and has capacity for verifying both partners in the interaction with iNat community ID.
Website should be working! Maybe try clearing your cookies? The link again is below:
I’m pretty sure it will let you add multiple URLs to that “partner” observation field if you separate them with semicolons? But let me know if it doesn’t! I’m pretty sure we haven’t implemented a way to actually visualize these types of observation on the website yet but on the iNaturalist side of things you should be able to have multiple eaters per organism being eaten (and vice-versa). I should add a note about this to the observation field descriptor so it’s clearer that you can do this… Thanks for bringing this up!
Yes, leaf miners/galls are appropriate/welcome!
Yes, I think because adding to the project is somewhat complicated, it’s not uncommon for this to happen (e.g. if you add the observation to the project on the iNat app, you might forget to come back and fill out the observation fields on the iNat website). We are probably a ways out from getting a computer program to do this for us, but in the meantime the iNat community can certainly help by filling out observation fields for incomplete interactions, and/or asking users to post observations of “partners!” I do this from time to time. Also using iNat computer vision to search for, e.g., “snake eating lizard” can be a good way to find new observations to add to the project.
This is a great thought @gijsroaming. I will think about ways to better automate/flag observations needing partners etc.
Yes, add both observations to the project, each with a URL linking one “partner observation” to the other. Here is a good example of an interaction by @gmanglik where both observations are filled in correctly:
As of right now there are 13,918 observations in this iNaturalist project, but the interactive food web (https://whoeatswhom.org/interactive-food-web) shows only 6,242 observations being used. It looks like you’re running the calculations only periodically. Makes sense, but how often do you update?
Searching your website I noticed that nobody eats fungi, or earthworms, or moths, and none of them eat anything. Though searching the iNaturalist project there are quite a number of all three. So I assume those are all observations that were added since the latest update. Are they?
I suppose it is at least partly due to the fact that the food web only admits RG observations. I know that I have uploaded quite a few observations, where I hoped the prey could be identified. But I do have a gecko eating an IDed moth: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/248674134 and that appears in the web.
If clearing your cookies doesn’t work you may have extensions that are interfering. I wasn’t able to run this site with the iNaturalist Enhancement Suite active.
Oh, I hadn’t considered RG vs not RG. Maybe that’s part of it. Unfortunate, really, considering the poor state of earthworm IDs that has them far from RG at this time. All the same, there are some RG observations that don’t seem to count, as your example shows.
Yep, @susanne-kasimir is right; since we are only ingesting research-grade observations right now, the interactions on the website are a small subset of the total observations in the full database.
That’s because the search only works at species-level. We hope to release a version soon where you can search at coarser levels than species!
Yes, this works perfectly, thanks a bunch!
I was also thinking a really nice feature for the interactive food web would be the ability to click on nodes and highlight/expand their specific connections (essentially what the search function does now, but by clicking rather than searching).
Just now joined the project, looks very interesting! Will search my collection and will have more observations to add.
Website does not seem to work on my main browser (Brave) even with clearing cookies and my cache and adjusting settings. It does however work on Chrome!
I appreciate this project a lot. It has really encouraged me in logging prey species as well as predator (As well as identifying pollinator plants)!
How does the project deal with cases where the “partner” observation is the observation itself? In other words where the field for the partner observation URL contains the observation’s own URL. This could easily happen by mistake, but maybe this could also be valid in cases of cannibalism. Are these cases addressed in some way?
Is the partner observation required to show the eater in the observation?
In this example the eater is a parasitic plant and my photo shows the fruit of the parasite. The fruit of the host plant is also in the photo but takes up only a small portion of the photo.
