That’s honest. you would be amazed at the HUGE number of contributions made by YOU in the many hundreds of posts I have encountered in recent months.
My pleasure here is Observing and Posting which always takes me an age, I seem to be doing less and less of that. Retirement itself seems to take up all of my time. I would have thought of you this eve over a glass of wine, but it’s one of the new Govt.Abstinence days. Oh well…
We, Helen (HB) and I have finished the Moth Project
978 observations await your attention - updated today - 2nd Oct.
UPDATED and supplimented (Larvae) - thanks to a few extra helpers
GORGEOUS MOTH
some lovely cross-community co-operation gave this moth a name
Still going strong
Hello! I apologise in advance for the quite probably foolish question but how does one access easily the painstakingly curated Unidentified Moths / Moth Pit, so as to review and hopefully, in a few cases at least, identify them? I can see that the seemingly irrepressible and inexhaustible dejayM has undertaken an astonishing amount of work. But as a new initiate to iSpot with some moth experience, how may I participate and contribute? Thanks!
It’s here:
Thank you!
There are many uninspiring photos in there, for instance of middling dun moths which have battered themselves threadbare amid the egg-boxes of light-traps, and a seemingly endless number of Tortrix species…
There were at least two contributions I think are caddis and I have identified them as such.
May I ask please: if an UN IDd moth gets IDd, how does it leave the pit?
I assume that it will disappear once the “likely ID” is no longer “Heterocera”.
Stephen (Bluebirdresearch) is to be congratulated for his attempts to skim the deep PIT.
Thanks
Be useful to throw these 1000 through iNaturalists CV suggester en masse! 
It seems to do ok with moths…
Seems like there’s quite a few problems spoken of here which could be solved with coding interventions…
Is the site still updated much?
Not very much…
Admirable understatement
Hello, everyone, I’ve started trying to identify some of the micro-lepidoptera in the bottomless moth pit (and to out those I believe or suspect are caddisflies). It’s quite daunting; often there’s a single unsatisfactory photograph from a less than ideal perspective, or the specimen is worn, and the description of location or habitat is basic or lacking. But even more fundamental problems are that many species are variable or, frankly, cannot be identified from a photograph.
So my questions are:
i) how useful is it to just assign a genus?
ii) how useful is a tentative ID?
iii) does iSpot interlink with iRecord and, if so, should I exercise more caution?
i) how useful is it to just assign a genus? VERY USEFUL, it removes the damned thing from the project - everyone knows it’s a MOTH!
ii) how useful is a tentative ID? VERY USEFUL, because between us we invoke the Likely Banner and so it removes the damned thing from the project - everyone knows it’s a MOTH! Your added IDs are no worse than someone quite knowledgeable making the Observation and FAR better than the posters who made made most of these Observations anyway.
iii) does iSpot interlink with iRecord and, if so, should I exercise more caution? - er…NO. we prefer to go it alone, we have the very best observers, photographers and -ologists here - honest.
name withheld
Additionally, thanks for your efforts! dejayM has posted passionately about the difficulties of posting poor photos and/or not adding sufficient detail of habitat to aid identification, but people (including me, occasionally) still leap in.
As note many moons ago, when the world was young, and the site hadn’t been buggered up, it was noted that what most people want from a post is an answer of some sort. So a (sometimes very) generalised identification, if coupled with a brief explanation of why no closer one can be offered - couched in polite phrasing - is much better than silence.
1 Like
Yes, well said.
More boring stuff from me again though.
We few laboured over this for a month or two. Unidentified MOTHS are building up again as are Pictureless posts
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/770782/
i) how useful is it to just assign a genus?
Yes useful. If you also add something explaining why you cannot provide a more detailed ID that provides useful information to the observer as to what they need to do in order to get identifiable records. That sort of education is exactly what iSpot is for.
ii) how useful is a tentative ID?
The idea is that iSpot is self-correcting. If you put something down and people think it is wrong they can suggest an alternative. So yes add it, explain your reasoning, and let things go.
iii) does iSpot interlink with iRecord and, if so, should I exercise more caution?
I beleive some recording schemes do harvest records from iSpot, and some (more?) do the same from iRecord, However iSpot is really badly designed[1] to be a recording scheme, its purposes is to help develop ID skills, so I’d always encourage people to submit their records directly to a recording scheme.
[1] For the avoidance of doubt this is not a criticism. iSpot is not meant to be a recording scheme so that it is badly designed to be one is simply a reflect of its different purpose.
Thank you.
I’ve been studying caddis over the last three weeks (after weeding out some from the moths) and iSpot has proved very useful, in supplying all sorts of species photographed from various angles to hone ID skills on. I’ve favourited all caddisflies I’ve come across and compared them with text books, with specimens already confidently identified by experts on iSpot (we’re fortunate to have Ian Wallace dropping by!) and with some other photographic collections on the web that appear to be reliable. I’ve “agreed” with previous identifications mostly as a way of marking them for myself as having been reviewed. Anyway, I just wanted to say that iSpot has really helped me to build up a photographic reference collection and develop some basic skills in acddisfly ID.
Will get back to the micro-lepidoptera in due course…