sex

The Darwin Core comments about the term sex suggested that when the record refers to more than one individual, their sexes be reported as a list, including the number of individuals of each sex. The example provided was: "8 males, 4 females".

However, during an open public review within the TDWG community, a consensus was reached to not include lists of sexes, nor counts of individuals of a given sex in the sex field. In earlier versions of the commentaries about the term, the example "8 males, 4 females" was given. This has been removed as being a mix of concepts and not a valid single value for the sex of an Organism at the time of an Occurrence (since sex of an Organism can change over time).

Here is an example. How should one populate Darwin Core terms for a record of 2 males and 5 females in a single lot?

Strictly speaking, there is no single sex that matches the biological individuals in this example lot Occurrence record, and so the sex fields should be left blank.

sex = null individualCount = 7 dynamicProperties = { "count of males":2, "count of females":5 }