What are some of the funniest accidents/mistakes that you have ever made on iNat or the forum.
Looking forward to seeing some of the replys.
Sorry if this is already a topic.
What are some of the funniest accidents/mistakes that you have ever made on iNat or the forum.
Looking forward to seeing some of the replys.
Sorry if this is already a topic.
I donāt know how it happened, but the other day I identified a Crown of Thorns euphorbia as a bird. There were no birds in the photo. I cannot imagine what I typed that lead to ābirdsā even being in the list of clickable options, or how I clicked on it without noticing.
maybe one with a similar name?
No, it wasnāt IDāed as any particular bird, just āBirdsā.
Iāve posted this roadkill āaccidentā before.
I hit a fish with my car.
Apparently, somewhere in the world they call cheetahs āTeneā. Far too many times I have typed āTeneā for family Tenebrionidae (darkling beetles) and ended up calling it a cheetah.
Sometimes people mix up Gambelia (the plant) and Gambelia (the leopard lizard) which gives some funny identificationsā¦
The iNat app has a recurring glitch where editing one observation will slap your edited annotations onto a completely different observation than the one you opened⦠so when I edited this observation to clarify that I knew the leaves in the background were a separate plant, it applied that description and ID to a scorpion observation I hadnāt touched since I first posted it in 2019. Thus we got the ultra rare scorpionberry, known to occur nowhere elsewhere.
Luckily someone found it (I guess by checking for observations that were stuck in the State of Matter Life category?)-- it had overridden the scorpion ID with a flowering plant so the community ID was pushed back to that-- and commented that they werenāt sure why I had suddenly decided the scorpion was actually a plant. Every time I hit agree to fix the problem, it just agreed with something different that was also incorrect. I deleted several of them completely. It is fixed now, but not without incurring a lot of embarrassment in the process.
Iām just glad that it took the description Iād added too, because without recognizing that I never wouldāve figured out how on earth that whole thing happened! And of course, Iām glad someone left a comment to let me know, otherwise I wouldāve been completely unaware.
I enjoyed @ adamschafferās comment - āI agree that the berries and leaves belong to a scorpion.ā
I canāt name them (too many), but I have made some really strange confirmations with Canadian Noctuidae. When pointed out, my response is usually āI donāt know what I was thinkingā. Iām pretty careful about that stuff, but Iām starting to think Iām mildly dyslexic. I often get letters and numbers mixed up but I donāt know if it is the way I tend to scan words and numbers vs the detail I look for on moths!
Iāve had a moth IDed as a damselfish for a while. Given I am a veteran moth IDer it was embarassing when another moth person corrected it
I had a series of photos of a Pika in an iNat record that somehow had a photo of a plant inserted into it. It wasnāt even my plant photo. Turns out it was a bug in the system that caused someone elseās photo to get pulled in when I was uploading or editing. When I complained that someoneās grass photo somehow got into my Pika pics, a botanist helpfully informed me that it was actually a Carex ⦠which wasnāt the help I was looking for.
Iāll be honest and say Iāve made my fair share of wrong IDs, though thereās only one that I recall being especially unfortunate. I was helping out with some butterfly observations and I saw one I wasnāt familiar enough with to ID down to species, but I could at least confidently (and wrongly) assume it was somewhere in Nymphalidae. This was a very bad time to somehow forget that Metalmarks exist, because not only was it a Metalmark, but a rarely seen one. Iām disappointed that I couldnāt be more helpful on such an impressive observation!
humans identifying as moth people nowadays⦠where do we draw the line? /s
I just added the ID Ensifera (hummingbird genus) to an observation with blurry photo of a cricket or a katydid incorrectly identified to genus, instead of Ensifera (suborder of Orthoptera). Already happened the third time. Fortunately I noticed it right away when I wanted to annotate it as nymph, and only juvenile was availabe.
Well, there were two occasions. The first one was when I somehow selected a picture of my bicolor blenny in my aquarium to go with a photo of an insect sighting(I forgot which one). The photo of the fish went before the that of the insect so at first glance it looked like I somehow identified a bicolor blenny as some sort of insect. Luckily, I noticed as soon as I uploaded the sighting and corrected it so I do not think anybody saw that. The other occasion was when I misspelled my iNat username on my iNat forum profile. It was like that for two months before someone pointed it out.
A glitch once caused me to put several dozen identical IDs on an observation.
Took a picture of a duck in bright light, where I couldnāt see the screen very well, then absent-mindedly slapped it into an observation. If Iād double-checked while uploading, I might have noticed the waterline. It was a decoy.
I uploaded an observation of a fake duck.
I once mis-clicked and called a red-tailed hawk a red-tailed boa, a listed name for Boa imperator. Birds are reptiles, butā¦not like that.
If bot mistakes count, Iāve recently observed a chukar partridge and the bot was no helpāit suggested Owls.
Thereās an observation in the Geralds of the World project of a Human (Homo sapiens) that was misidentified as a Cinnebar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae).