lightroom classic images get over written

when i go on a photo shoot i'll shoot thousands of images using two bodies and four cards, all identical. I'll upload images off the cards to an external travel hard drive into Lightroom classic onto my macbook pro using 12.4 Monterey. I make a new catalog for the trip and I'll start editing and deleting images right away from the hard drive. I'll format my cards in camera. maybe putting the cards in a different body, not really paying attention to that. After I have thousands of images and im editing in library mode grid view, the older or first of the trip will be at top in chronological order. Then the newer images will start replacing some but not all of the older images and ill loose these in the lightroom catalog but not on the hard drive. When the new image replaces these older ones the captioning i've done is still there for the older image but the image is replaced with a newer one. and now older or first one is gone. could it be due to the numbering system in the two different bodies? My last trip is had to start over after hours of editing and i deleted all the images from the catalog and then had to reload all the images from the hard drive into my catalog and re edit and caption them all after all the work i'd done. Another thought i have is when i delete an older photo from both catalog and hard drive could the newer image with a similar number fill that void? any ideas on what im doing wrong? or how to not have this happen? thanks and if it helps im including a screen shot showing my orangutan photos with some geese that i took a month later and loade. The geese have replaced the orangs and you can barely see the keywords say borneo and not california while the goose is highlighted. The orangs were taken in borneo and the goose in california.