August challenge: Identify "stranded" Gasteracanthine observations

There are 60+ observations of Gasteracanthine orb-weavers that are stuck at a family-level ID or even a higher taxonomic rank, so they are not showing up in our project and are unlikely to get quick IDs. Let's see how many we can identify during the month of August: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?field%3AGasteracanthine+annotations=Gasteracanthine+clade

While there a variety of reasons that observations may be "stranded" at a higher-level community ID, these three situations are the most common:

--Gasteracantha cancriformis observations with an incorrect initial ID of some sort, e.g., someone IDing the observation as Thomisidae because G. cancriformis is colloquially called "crab spider" in some places.

--Thelacantha brevispina with an initial ID of Gasteracantha or similar.

--Austracantha minax with an initial ID of Gasteracantha or similar.

Together, we've been able to ID more than 95 percent of the 7,600+ Gasteracanthine observations on iNaturalist! By contrast, only 1/3 of all spider reports on iNaturalist (more than half a million) have achieved Research Grade, so we are doing quite well in this little corner of the spiderverse.

(Note: If you run across other observations like this, you can add the "Gasteracanthine annotations" Observation Field and choose value "Gasteracanthine clade" so that they won't get lost in the bigger sea of orbweavers or arachnids.)

Here's the link again: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&field%3AGasteracanthine+annotations=Gasteracanthine+clade

Happy IDing!

Posted on August 4, 2019 05:57 PM by djringer