Funniest accidents on iNat

[hedgehog111]

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.

[Vireya]

I don’t 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 “birds” even being in the list of clickable options, or how I clicked on it without noticing.

[dan686]

maybe one with a similar name?

[Vireya]

No, it wasn’t ID’ed as any particular bird, just “Birds”.

[simono]

I’ve posted this roadkill ‘accident’ before.
I hit a fish with my car.

Ord River Mullet (Planiliza alata) from Kununurra WA 6743, Australia on October 28, 2020 at 09:05 PM by simono. This 35cm mullet must have gotten stuck in the undercarriage of my vehicle when I went through th… · iNaturalist

[sammydstecher]

Apparently, somewhere in the world they call cheetahs “Tene”. Far too many times I have typed “Tene” for family Tenebrionidae (darkling beetles) and ended up calling it a cheetah.

[gheaton]

Sometimes people mix up Gambelia (the plant) and Gambelia (the leopard lizard) which gives some funny identifications…

[artemesia]

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 hadn’t 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 weren’t 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.

I’m just glad that it took the description I’d added too, because without recognizing that I never would’ve figured out how on earth that whole thing happened! And of course, I’m glad someone left a comment to let me know, otherwise I would’ve been completely unaware.

[mamestraconfigurata]

I enjoyed @ adamschaffer’s comment - “I agree that the berries and leaves belong to a scorpion.”

[mamestraconfigurata]

I can’t name them (too many), but I have made some really strange confirmations with Canadian Noctuidae. When pointed out, my response is usually ‘I don’t know what I was thinking’. I’m pretty careful about that stuff, but I’m starting to think I’m mildly dyslexic. I often get letters and numbers mixed up but I don’t know if it is the way I tend to scan words and numbers vs the detail I look for on moths!

[rayray]

I’ve 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

[jnstuart]

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 wasn’t even my plant photo. Turns out it was a bug in the system that caused someone else’s photo to get pulled in when I was uploading or editing. When I complained that someone’s grass photo somehow got into my Pika pics, a botanist helpfully informed me that it was actually a Carex … which wasn’t the help I was looking for.

[Mercedes-Fletcher]

I’ll be honest and say I’ve made my fair share of wrong IDs, though there’s only one that I recall being especially unfortunate. I was helping out with some butterfly observations and I saw one I wasn’t 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. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t be more helpful on such an impressive observation!

[timo27]

humans identifying as moth people nowadays… where do we draw the line? /s

[typophyllum]

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.

[northernborealis]

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.

[coniontises]

A glitch once caused me to put several dozen identical IDs on an observation.

[fishkeeper]

Took a picture of a duck in bright light, where I couldn’t see the screen very well, then absent-mindedly slapped it into an observation. If I’d double-checked while uploading, I might have noticed the waterline. It was a decoy.
I uploaded an observation of a fake duck.

[regoggin]

I once mis-clicked and called a red-tailed hawk a red-tailed boa, a listed name for Boa imperator. Birds are reptiles, but…not like that.

If bot mistakes count, I’ve recently observed a chukar partridge and the bot was no help–it suggested Owls.

[vreinkymov]

There’s an observation in the Geralds of the World project of a Human (Homo sapiens) that was misidentified as a Cinnebar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae).