October 20, 2023

Website update

Hi everyone!

I'm really excited to share that we have finished putting together a new and much improved version of the Who Eats Whom website (https://whoeatswhom.org/). You can now type in the common name of an organism and see what it eats, and what eats it, according to the ~4,000 observations currently submitted to the project.

In order for your observation to be displayed on the website, the following must be true:

  1. You must submit two observations: one of the "eater" and the other of the organism being eaten
  2. Both observations must be IDed to research-grade
  3. Both observations must have the "URL for partner observation" field filled out.

For a good example of a feeding observation that follows these rules, see this recent observation by @heifer03 of a Joro Spider eating an Eastern Yellowjacket here (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/187919137) and here (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/187919136). As a result of following these rules, this neat observation is displayed on the website if you search "Who eats..."Eastern Yellowjacket" or if you search "Who is eaten by..." "Joro Spider."

Obviously, there is still a lot of work to do to improve the technical aspects of the site (e.g. the drop-down menu is pretty clunky). But the basic functionality should work and so I wanted to go ahead and share that with you. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions, and thanks so much for contributing to this project!

Posted on October 20, 2023 07:34 PM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 0 comments | Leave a comment

October 11, 2022

Removing an observation field

Hi Eaters,

Quick update: I removed the observation field "does this observation feature an animal eating a plant, animal or fungus?" from the project because it felt a bit redundant. Given the name of our project it should be pretty clear what kinds of observations we are looking for. If we start to get inappropriate observations I'll add it back.

Posted on October 11, 2022 03:37 AM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 6 comments | Leave a comment

February 1, 2022

Finding Observations

Hi all,

@jellyturtle had a great idea: there are a lot of existing observation fields that mention predation etc. (see here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=prey&commit=Search). So to collect more observations for our project, it could be helpful for us to use those fields to find observations for our project that already exist on iNat. We can then ask users who submitted these observations if they would be willing to add their observation to Who Eats Whom.

Below is some example text you can use and personalize as you see fit. I'm going to start doing this and if anyone else wants to spend some time doing so as well it would be helpful!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Neat find! Please consider adding this feeding observation to the Who Eats Whom project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/who-eats-whom). If you're interested, you would need to upload a second observation of the [spider, etc.]. See the two observations below for an example of how to do this. Thanks for your consideration!

Observation 1: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/105901414
Observation 2: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/105901413

Posted on February 1, 2022 07:51 PM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 0 comments | Leave a comment

January 18, 2022

We have a website!

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for being a part of Who Eats Whom. I'm writing to share that we have a website with a simple mockup of the observations submitted to our project so far.

Link here: https://whoeatswhom.org/

The home page shows species-level interactions among all research-grade observations of predation in our project. A separate page shows the relationship at a coarser taxonomic level. More features will be coming out to make these graphics more useful (searchable, for instance) in the coming months.

Thanks again and please let me know your thoughts! I've had to really up my coding skills to bring all the different pieces together for this and am pleased to finally see at least the beginnings of a useful end result for everyone.

Best,

Bradley

Posted on January 18, 2022 05:13 AM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 3 comments | Leave a comment

December 5, 2020

How we're using the data

Hi eaters,

Thanks so much for your work on Who Eats Who. I wanted to share a web page draft of how these data will be used, eventually. This web page shows the kind of large-scale food web visualizations and databases we hope to create, both of which will be useful to ecological researchers and conservation biologists around the globe. The data shown below are from a different project on iNaturalist, "Interactions S Afr" but the idea is the same.

Link: https://rpubs.com/brad7280/whoeatswhosafrica

Let me know if you have any questions and thanks again for your work!

Please remember to submit TWO observations to this project for every instance of feeding behavior you observe: the animal/plant/fungus being eaten AND the animal doing the eating.

Posted on December 5, 2020 03:41 PM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 11 comments | Leave a comment

November 23, 2020

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

Posted on November 23, 2020 01:23 AM by bradleyallf bradleyallf | 3 comments | Leave a comment