Why isn't "Kingdom Bacteria" shown on the Life taxa page?

[danaleeling]

“Kingdom Bacteria” (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/67333-Bacteria) is shown as being grafted onto Life but is not listed on the Life taxa page (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa). Just wondering why.

[jwidness]

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa doesn’t show taxa grafted to Life, it shows Iconic Taxa

[tisli]

Is there a place where we can see all the branches coming out of Life?

[jwidness]

I made this a while ago, you can see it there

[gijsroaming]

Even if the categories are not meant to represent taxa grafted to life, this topic does raise the valid question of why bacteria are clumped in with unknowns. When identifyers want to move observations without any ID into their basic iconic taxa this does raise some issues, because it will show all bacteria and archaea with proper IDs alongside unknowns. I know there are other ways of doing this, but I am still curious what the reasoning is behind the choice to group specifc taxa with unknowns as one category?

[swampster]

You may be interested in this feature request: Create iconic taxa for bacteria, archaea, and viruses

Also:

@kevinfaccenda

You can use the identified=false argument in the URL to remove these when you are identifying unknowns and it will remove bacteria and viruses. Here’s the link I use.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=60&iconic_taxa=unknown&order_by=random&order=asc&identified=false

though this will remove “unknowns” where two disagreeing IDs have pushed the observation back to life. You can also use:

@lotteryd

It will pull up a mix of only Unknown and “State of Matter Life” if you add the following chunk to your search url:

&without_taxon_id=67333%2C131236%2C151817

@lotteryd

Here is an exclusion chunk that I currently use in my Unknowns only/ no Life url:
&without_taxon_id=48460%2C1126112%2C67333%2C131236%2C151817%2C48222

the 48460 number excludes all Life, and makes the later numbers redundant, but I keep those in so that I can adjust the focus with an easy edit. I forget what the other couple numbers do.

Edit: 1126112 was from some unrelated past issue and can be removed so
&without_taxon_id=48460%2C67333%2C131236%2C151817%2C48222

[danaleeling]

Thanks! That is what I was expecting to see based on how the other taxa pages are set up, that Life would list the kingdoms. Thanks too for the solution: Life shows the iconic taxa, which solved for me a second question which was why unequal ranks were listed on the Life taxa page, Now it all makes sense, I just couldn’t see this before! The iNat expandable taxa is useful to science educators! Wonderful!