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Arctos is a museum collections management system
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Best method to record prey/diet description #2032

Closed Jegelewicz closed 5 years ago

Jegelewicz commented 5 years ago

From Vicky at UTEP as she prepares to catalog their ants

Prey / diet description ?? – I need something like the stomach contents attribute. The food description variable describes food that was found being carried or in the nest of the ants; can be prey or seeds

I think of at least three ways this could be done.

Catalog the prey/food as an observation, then using the relationship "ate/eaten by" relate the prey/diet to the ant record(s)

OR

Create a new attribute: food = food being carried by or found in conjunction with the collected species ( I don't like the attribute name, but can't think of anything better at the moment)

OR

reference prey/diet in "Associated species" (my least favorite option)

campmlc commented 5 years ago

Catalog the prey/food as an observation, then using the relationship "ate/eaten by" relate the prey/diet to the ant record(s) This is the most powerful option, because you can then associate the food/ prey using real taxonomic terms in a searchable taxonomic hierarchy. This is what we do for parasite / host. These relationships are searchable.

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019, 3:47 PM Teresa Mayfield-Meyer notifications@github.com wrote:

From Vicky at UTEP as she prepares to catalog their ants

Prey / diet description ?? – I need something like the stomach contents attribute. The food description variable describes food that was found being carried or in the nest of the ants; can be prey or seeds

I think of at least three ways this could be done.

Catalog the prey/food as an observation, then using the relationship "ate/eaten by" relate the prey/diet to the ant record(s)

OR

Create a new attribute: food = food being carried by or found in conjunction with the collected species ( I don't like the attribute name, but can't think of anything better at the moment)

OR

reference prey/diet in "Associated species" (my least favorite option)

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dustymc commented 5 years ago

Catalog the prey/food as an observation, then using the relationship "ate/eaten by" relate the prey/diet to the ant record(s)

That's best.

"Associated species"

Our documentation is pretty sparse (http://handbook.arctosdb.org/documentation/catalog.html#associated-species), but that's generally for "grows under oak trees."

new attribute

It's the same-ish idea as https://arctos.database.museum/info/ctDocumentation.cfm?table=CTATTRIBUTE_TYPE&field=stomach%20contents even if the details are different. I think it's better to generalize that (maybe to "food") than to fire up a new attribute for ALMOST the same thing. https://arctos.database.museum/info/ctDocumentation.cfm?table=CTATTRIBUTE_TYPE&field=crop%20contents is weird too.

mvzhuang commented 5 years ago

OK plan 1 sounds like a plan. Thanks guys!