Projektin Caterpillars of Eastern North America Päiväkirja

David Wagner, author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America, is profiled by Elizabeth Kolbert in the current issue of The New Yorker.

"For every ten butterfly fanciers, there are approximately zero caterpillar enthusiasts."

Let's prove her wrong!

Thanks to my dad for passing along the article.

Annotations streamline adding observations to project

Now that we are a collector project, we no longer have to painstakingly add caterpillar observations to the project one at a time. However, they still need to be annotated Life Stage = Larva in order for the project to pull them in, and ensuring that observations of larval Lepidoptera are annotated appropriately still represents a significant effort. For example, I personally review all Lepidoptera observations from 12 US states and 129 Texas counties, and I have a hard time keeping up. A few other intrepid volunteers review similarly large chunks of the project area (or have in the past). I would like to maintain good coverage to maximize the completeness of the project, but would also like to share the effort among more people so that no one feels burdened by the number of observations awaiting their review.

We need your help!

To make this happen, we would love to have people volunteer to take on the review of Lepidoptera observations for a state or province in the project area (or any group or subset thereof - a tri-state area, a single county, you name it). If you are interested, please leave a comment below naming the area you'd like to be responsible for & I will create a custom search URL for you to use. It's fun & easy, and is a great opportunity to learn about the Lepidoptera in a particular area.

How it works

You can use whatever process you want for adding annotations, but I'll briefly summarize the way I do it as one option.

Every few days or few weeks (depending on the time of year & volume of observations in target place), visit custom link to your filtered Identify page.

For any observation on the first page of results that appears to be a caterpillar, click photo to open observation in the Identify viewer (clicking the taxon name below the picture will fully open, which is unnecessary), click the Annotations tab (or hold Shift and hit the right arrow key twice), select Life Stage = Larva (or hit the L key twice), then close (or hit Esc). If there are multiple caterpillars in a row or if you prefer to scroll through the large images of each observation, click the right arrow or use the right arrow key to advance through observations

Once all caterpillars on a page are annotated, I hit the Mark All as Reviewed button, wait for the number of observations reviewed (upper right) to change, then refresh the page to view the next 30 observations. This way I never have to remember which observations I have already looked at, but you may wish to use a different process at this step

It would be great if there were a way to select multiple observations and annotate them in batch, but for now this is the most efficient process I have come up with. I'll be interested to hear if other people have different suggestions.

The iNaturalist team recently released updates allowing projects to use annotation-based rules. As such, I have converted the caterpillar project to a collector. This means that all observations of Lepidoptera in the project area (North America east of the 100th meridian) that are annotated Life Stage = Larva will be added to the project automatically. This will relieve the burden on our project curators somewhat, as observations no longer have to be manually added to the project one at a time (although making sure caterpillar observations are annotated appropriately will still take some work). Thanks to @tiwane and the other developers for making this happen!

Thanks also to @bouteloua, @kimberlietx, @coatlicue, and everyone else who helped with the big push last year to get all of our project observations annotated when the annotations feature was added. This put us in a good position to take advantage of the new collector project rules without having to do lots of catch-up work.

Also, kudos to @christine123 for topping 1,000 caterpillar observations (more than twice as many as anyone else!), @kchiasson for having observations of the most caterpillar species (nearly 200!), and @k8thegr8 & @ericwilliams for being the top caterpillar-identifiers.

@jtuttle @berkshirenaturalist @kylejones

It seems like every year there's a period of a few weeks when I see a few Anisota caterpillars crossing the road near my office every day (although I don't seem to have posted any of them). Seeing two recent observations with asphalt backdrops, I started wondering if this is a particular trend. Browsing through the first 100 observations of Anisota senatoria larvae, it appears that 30-35 of them are on paved surfaces. Has anyone else noticed this?

@k8thegr8 @ericwilliams @jtuttle @berkshirenaturalist @kylejones

iNaturalist just announced new changes in the works for Projects. Once the planned addition of the ability to use annotations as a filtering parameter is implemented, I intend to convert this project to a "collector." While this will not entirely automate the process (since so many people do not annotate their observations), it should simplify our process. Once we make the transition, we shouldn't have to click through to individual observation pages and add them to the project; rather, once we have added the "Larva" annotation from the Identify page, they should be automatically added to the project.

New from the Journal of Wilderness & Environmental Medicine: Megalopyge opercularis Caterpillar Stings Reported to Texas Poison Centers.

Unfortunately, the article itself is behind a paywall, but the abstract is accessible.

As of this morning, Caterpillars of the Eastern US is now Caterpillars of Eastern North America. I have expanded the project parameters to include Canada's eastern provinces, which is more in line with my original intent (see discussion here). I will also be adding eastern Mexico sometime in the next few weeks.

We will need to work through the backlog of past observations for these provinces as we originally did for each of the project states, and I propose that we work at it in the same way, with people volunteering to work through all observations of Lepidoptera for individual provinces. To aid in this process, I will create and post below links to Identify pages, filtered for each province. If you claim a province, please post a comment stating your intention, review all Lepidoptera observations, and add to the project (as well as adding the "life stage = larva" annotation) any which feature a caterpillar. For tent caterpillars & webworms, please only add those observations in which at least one caterpillar can be clearly made out as an individual & at a scale at which it is potentially identifiable (at least to genus); for bagworms, please only include observations in which the caterpillar is outside, or visible protruding from, the pupal case. More discussion on these finer points here, starting on the fourth comment down.

Welcome to the project, Canada! We look forward to meeting your caterpillars.

Check out this cool story from Scientific American about an aspect of caterpillar behavior that many of us may have never thought about: the sounds they produce. Want more details? The research described appears to build upon the scientist's University of Montana undergraduate thesis.

Click here to see observations of the species this research is based on, the walnut sphinx caterpillar (Amorpha juglandis), in our project.

As many of you are probably aware, the iNaturalist developers have rolled out several platform updates recently, including a new format for observation pages, some new features on the updated taxon pages, and also an observation feature called annotations. This tool takes a select few of the most used observation fields & standardizes them, which provides an opportunity to enrich iNaturalist data in a way that can be used for features such as the Life Stage trend graph on taxon pages for those taxa that have a Life Stage annotation option (which I have found especially interesting for some insects. With regard to this project, the annotation tool provides an opportunity to define, in a standardized & searchable manner, the life stage for insect observations. As the goal of this project is specifically related to insect life stage, I see this as an opportunity to improve our project data, and would like to move toward having all project observations annotated as life stage = larva. If we are able to do this retroactively for all current project observations, I can add a project parameter stating that observations must be marked as such in order to be included in the project. This will help us to collect additional new observations, and will also enrich the dataset & improve the life stage trend graphs for the project taxa.

How will we do this? Unfortunately, there is not yet a batch tool to annotate multiple records at once. However, there are some keyboard shortcuts available in the Identify tool that make it fairly quick to annotate records. While there are over 20,000 observations in our project, I hope that, with our 100+ members, we will have enough person-power to get all these observations annotated without any single person having to do a vast amount of work.

We need your help adding annotations to project observations.

It's easy, and you get to look at lots of cool caterpillar photos!

To add annotations to project observations, start with this link to the Identify tool, filtered to only include observations that have been added to the project but have not yet been annotated with life stage. Click the thumbnail to open the first observation, select the Annotations tab, then add the annotation Life Stage = Larva. You can do this quickly with keyboard shortcuts: simply type "ll" [for L(ife Stage) L(arva)], then use the right arrow key to move on to the next observation. If you just want to see those from a specific state or area, you can filter them further by adding something to the "Place" box. If you happen to find an observation that doesn't belong in the project (e.g., an adult butterfly or moth, or a sawfly larva masquerading as a caterpillar), please annotate it appropriately, and then send me a message so that I can remove it from the project.

Special thanks to @bouteloua for suggesting crowd-sourcing this process using the Identify tool, and thank you to everyone who has participated in the project. Stay tuned for a post in the next few months with some analysis of our project data.

Texas has nearly 50,000 Lepidoptera observations, nearly 45,000 of which are in the part of the state east of the 100th meridian (our project area). It would be overwhelming for a single person to review all these observations looking for caterpillars to add to the project (which has been our method for other states). In order to make it more manageable, I have divided East Texas into 15 sections, lumping counties with fewer observations & leaving counties with lots of observations as standalone sections. Each section has between 1,000 & 5,000 observations, except for Travis County (home to Austin), which has 7,088 all by itself. We will manage this the same way we have for the states: people can claim sections, post when they have completed them, and I will keep an updated list here at the top. Please keep track of users who have caterpillar observations that can't be added to the project, and send me a direct message with their usernames so that I can send them a message to invite them to the project. Here's the list - clicking a section will take you directly to an Identify page for that section. You can also see a map of the sections here.
Section A: Northwest & Central - eraskin (complete)
Section B: Northeast - eraskin (complete)
Section C: Southeast - eraskin (complete)
Section D: South - eraskin (complete)
Section E: Greater Houston - psweet (complete)
Section F: North Central (greater Dallas-Ft. Worth) - jtuttle (complete)
Section G: West Central* - eraskin (complete)
Section H: Tarrant County - jtuttle (complete)
Section I: Denton County - psweet (complete)
Section J: Dallas County - jtuttle (complete)
Section K: Travis County jtuttle (complete)
Section L: Hays County - eraskin (complete)
Section M: Williamson County - kylejones (complete)
Section N: Harris County - kylejones (complete)
Section O: Hidalgo County - jtuttle (complete)
*If you take Section G, please keep an eye on the coordinates of any caterpillars that you find, and don't add them to the project if the longitude is more than 100°W (-100 or beyond).

Last update: 2/4/2017, 1312