Another Day 2: Trying out Seek
I heard about Seek for the first time on Tuesday evening.
I took it for a proper spin on Wednesday and started to immediately advertise it to everyone I came across.
My first thought: Oh cool! It has achievements and challenges! Just what I wanted, more excuses to go find All The Things and do science to them!
My third thought: Oh wow, now even my mother can just identify stuff by pointing the app at them, without the "participate in citizen science" effort of iNaturalist!
In between, I had the app telling me the names of things it found in Latin instead of the Finnish localized names. It's been a Duolingo dive into the plants I already know, re-bioblitzing plants I somewhat already knew, and suddenly seeing relations between things that I wasn't aware of before, and laughing at silly names like "a bramble with round head".
I think Seek is to plants (and to some degree even moving lifeforms, if tame enough to stay in the camera) what Merlin is to birding. Providing a real-time response for "what's that?" is a killer app. Though Plantnet is still better for ID that you can do more carefully, one tagged photo at a time, the capability being built with Seek is completely outrageous - you don't even need to take that picture now.
And on top of that it's educational, designed kid-friendly (which also makes it grandma-friendly), and I must say, posting the IDs on iNaturalist is MUCH more encouraging and straightforward than trying to eBird annotations from Merlin (an equivalent from-local-observation-to-science situation) - not only is eBird much harder to use casually, to top it off it asks "are you sure?" when trying to submit a bird observation, which makes it impossible. I'm an amateur! Of course I'm not sure!
The iNaturalist community is awesome and an important part of this friendliness, of course. One day I will be learned enough to help identify things beyond the very utterly most obvious.
The main awkwardness I have about Seek is that it's not easy to add additional photos on ONE observation in it, so I first have to post it on iNat with the Latin name that I can't really review, then wait for the sync to happen, wait for iNat-end sync to happen, then open it to add additional pictures (particularly if the sole-picture is IMO hard for humans to provide an ID on), and while at it notice that it's identified a thing that eats a specific tree as a thing that eats a very different tree but looks similar and correct that.
Apologies in advance and past to all who get to correct the IDs I'm getting from Seek. I've tagged the ones I'm aware of looking a bit off, but for many things I can't tell enough from the sample small picture if it's maybe accurate or completely off. I try to work with them in batches on the laptop and focus on the ones where we didn't get them right already by the time I got to sitting still.
So far I've completed 13 challenges out of the approximately one bazillion there are. I'm struggling the most with the current challenge which requires getting a picture of two insects. Insects are not someting Seek is good at. Insects and hay plants (heinät). It can identify a large batch of reeds, but I can't get it to identify an individual rölli or a small group of them because of all the background noise it runs into - it can see it's one hay thingy but not what hay thingy it is.
I managed to get one insect from camera-staring at an old nest of a tree-leaf-eating bug, which was friendly enough to sit still long enough to be stared at. The ID was slightly wrong, I found out later when I saw it in iNaturalist, but it was a species and it was an insect.
I ended up spending one evening chasing different types of one partiular fly that I noticed were missing Finnish names, while trying to find the one it looked the most like. I couldn't get an exact ID, thanks to some wonderful people we narrowed it down to about 3 options, and concluded it can't get better than that.
A day or few earlier I learned way more than I ever need about dandelions and discovered a missing scientific name for the common dandelion (the one used in Finland) but don't know how to help with that since only curators can add missing synonyms. Filling in taxonomy stuff is actually amazingly fun too. I love naming things and putting names on things! And I can help with that just by reading references, I don't need to turn into a great identifier.
But speaking of that, I better go find a few easy things I can help identify.
PS. Saw https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-has-your-nature-knowledge-advanced-since-using-inat/52782/67 in an iNaturalist news posting, with encouragement to go answer what iNaturalist has done for your nature knowledge. I don't have a forum account yet but it has been an amazing ride so far and I'm expecting it will only get more fun from here. :)
I've already had wonderful people teach me wild things about fungi/lichen, actually go investigate weird fungi I found even, help me find a microphone for recording birds more productively, explain really elaborate things about pretty insects I've found, save some of my really obscure observations into project databases to help find identifiers for them, and not to mention turn a huge part of my 1229 observations so far into SCIENCE, which is incredibly motivating!
PPS. Speaking of wonderful people and fungi, I have an observation I took a picture of because I thought it looked funny, thought it was completely impossible to actually identify as anything whatsoever, then someone came and taught me about a type of fungus that grows tentacles like that. https://inaturalist.laji.fi/observations/174231023 (Ok, scientists call them rhizomorphs. I say they are tentacles with a fancy name.)
