Step 1: Using any platform, filter worldwide observations (obs) for Diaeini (Tribe of Thomisidae / Crab Spiders).
Step 2: Click on the “Species”-option (it shows around 64 species) and scroll down.
Step 3: You will find a few obs for genera of a different Tribe of Crab spiders called Coriarachnini. Examples include Xysticus, Ozyptila, Bassaniana.
Only a handful of obs of these genera show up when doing this, while most obs work normally.
In the link, I tracked down one of these obs that show up (but shouldn’t) when filtering for Diaeini and that one doesn’t show up filtering for Coriarachnini (the one it belongs to).
I didn’t go through all genera so I can’t tell you exactly which ones can show up wrongly and if other tribes have the same problem. I assume it’s some sort of glitch that happened when large groups of obs were transferred in the past but that’s just speculation
I noticed the same thing with a different Thomisidae subfamily and chalked it up to a browser glitch. It was with the Dietinae, and Tharrhalea (a Thomisinae) was showing up under it.
Was this group created/modified by a taxon change at some point? There have been similar cases in the past, e.g. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ants-appearing-in-vespoidea/28385, where certain observation’s ancestor hierarchies didn’t seem to get updated in sync with the taxon system. There doesn’t seem to be a great solution apart from manually IDing each affected obs.
Thanks, adding an ID to one of these glitched obs does fix the issue. Because this only affects probably less than 100 obs in Thomisidae, it is fixable this way.
I can’t tell you which taxon change exactly caused this but Thomisidae has had some in the past.
That’s actually the main reason i wrote this bug report: Because someday (idk when) there’s gonna be a huge change where Thomisidae will be moved to Lycosoidea.
And hopefully this glitch will be fixed beforehand
As I understand it, literally every spider taxon that isn’t specifically at the family, genus, species, or subspecies level was, at one point, created and implemented manually by an iNat curator - the parent taxonomic source that iNat uses for Araneae (the World Spider Catalog) doesn’t have those other taxonomic levels like infraorder, subfamily, tribe, species group, what have you.
Given that it only affects a very small subset of the observations in tribe Coriarachnini, I expect this issue was some sort of minor glitch that happened during the implementation of tribe Diaeini or tribe Coriarachnini that only affected a few observations.
This is a relatively common indexing bug. Sometimes just saving the rogue taxa will fix it. Other times the taxon (and all descendants first) must be inactivated and reactivated, which can be a pain depending on how large of a group it is.