Unwanted Cloned Encounter, Internet of Turtles

calvinm · October 21, 2025, 4:02pm

In which Wildbook did the issue occur? Internet of Turtles

What operating system were you using? Windows 11 Home Single Language, Version 23H2

What web browser were you using? Chrome Version 141.0.7390.108 (Official Build) (64-bit)

What is your role on the site? researcher

What happened? While submitting a turtle encounter, I completed the upload and then added a manual annotation (since the automatic annotation hadn’t appeared yet). After that, I proceeded to check the Match Results and noticed another encounter with exactly the same photo. It turns out that two identical encounters were created from the single upload I just submitted.

Here is the link do both encounters:
Internet of Turtles (Audit Trail: Submitted on Mon Oct 20 07:22:25 UTC 2025 from address: 172.20.0.6, new Annotation manually added by Calvin Muliawan)
Internet of Turtles (Audit Trail: NOTE: cloneWithoutAnnotations(aa9925c6-ce1a-45da-925b-7e350f12046d) → 7a4d040f-507b-4e08-b570-b9efb33bc912)

What did you expect to happen? I don’t think there should be another duplicate for the exact same encounter. Do you know why these automatic clone happened?

What are some steps we could take to reproduce the issue?

Here’s another example which I believe is the same issue: (4 clones)

Anastasia · October 21, 2025, 4:46pm

Hi @calvinm

What I suspect happened is that the automatic annotation had completed but the page hadn’t been refreshed to reflect that. Annotations don’t load right away when you open an encounter, it can take a few moments for them to display.

Your cloned encounter occurred because there are now two head annotations on the encounter (and since an encounter = one animal at a specific place and time, two head annotations means another animal must be present and needs its own encounter). Here’s an example from your first link:

Here’s our help page on Manual Annotations that includes an explanation on cloned encounters: Manual Annotation (Beta) — Wildbook documentation

My recommendation is to delete the unwanted cloned encounters. You can find the Delete Encounter? button when you click the Edit button in the Metadata section of an encounter page.