https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33526916
Is this visible to you? Site says it won~~t be seen by public.
The issue is that you did not add an ID of any kind, which makes it much less likely that the observation will be seen by others. I’ve added an ID to it. See: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#coarse-ids
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@bewambay, I think that’s just the standard text. I guess it could be clearer if it were written as “You are submitting observations without photos and/or taxon names.”
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The text in that box doesn’t really mean that the observation will not be visible at all. It means that it will not be included in the types of searches that most identifiers use. So along with a photo, if you can add an identification, even if it’s just “Animal,” that makes the observation so much easier to find.
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I can see your photo.
I’ve had trouble with that message myself. It means at least one of the two is missing, not necessarily both. I think the warning about posting without one of those is to encourage people to make their best guess, even as basic as Insect, Plant, Animal. For example, I don’t know a thing about identifying scorpions but I know one when I see it. If I suggest the ID Scorpions myself, the observation goes right into the lap of someone who knows scorpions so I get a speedy ID.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, especially at the beginning. When I Identified something as a Scorpion that was really a Whipscorpion, the scorpion folks were really nice about putting it in the right place.
You can learn a lot. Things I thought had to be bees and ants have turned out to be flies, the sneaky little mimics. So now I check my bees closely to make sure they’re really bees. And I’m still sometimes surprised, which I think is delightful.
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Yup I had a little larva that I thought was a moth caterpillar, so I put it into Lepidoptera, but it turns out it was a hover fly larva. If you can even get down to mammals, insects, birds, reptiles for animals, or like trees, flowers, or somewhere lower than animal/plant/fungus it’s a big help.
And importantly, it’s never bad to be wrong if that’s what you’re worried about. That’s how we learn.
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