New protocol for submitting observations
Hi all,
We are announcing a new protocol for submitting observations to Who Eats Who. Starting now, we are requiring submissions to the project to involve two individual observations uploaded to iNaturalist: the animal/plant/fungus being eaten and the animal doing the eating. BOTH these observations should be added to our project. It's ok if you use the same photograph(s) in both observations.
We have added a new required observation field to the project that involves providing a URL to the "partner" observation in order to link the two observations.
Making this change will allow us to more easily code feeding behavior in the model we are building, as without some kind of user-submitted data linking the two observations we would have to link the observations manually. This change will also increase the data quality of the observations since both the "eater" and the creature being eaten will have crowd-sourced IDs on iNaturalist.
Thanks so much for being a part of Who Eats Who! We are so happy this project has grown organically to over 200 observations and are excited to share with everyone the preliminary results of the project once we hit about 500 observations. Those results will involve a massive, interactive global food web hosted online-- it's going to be really neat!
Thanks all,
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
North Carolina State University
Comments
Should galls or aphids sucking juices out of plants be marked as parasitism? Or just save that for animal parasitizing another animal? What about ants farming aphids? Def not parasitism but maybe another special category?
Great question @lappelbaum . I think the galls/aphids case is best categorized as herbivory and that we should restrict the "parasitism" code to animal-animal interactions. While an aphid sucking plant juices is structurally similar to a mosquito sucking blood, it is functionally not too different from a caterpillar eating a leaf. In both cases, the animal is eating a part of a plant. It's much rarer for an animal to eat only part of another living animal, which makes the "parasitism" distinction most meaningful and specific for animal-animal interactions.
Ants farming aphids is also a really interesting edge case. Here is an animal eating a part of another living animal, but in an evolutionarily mutualisitc, rather than parasitic, relationship. I'm a bit stumped as to what to call this, apart from making an "other" code. I suppose that might be what I do, but let me know if you have any other ideas.
I appreciate your thoughts here!
Bradley
You're very welcome :)
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