Also, tagging any one of at least the top 5 IDers of that project is probably a good way to get help for your mystery blob. @lotteryd in particular is a self-described specialist in refining ‘general weird stuff’ appearing in unknowns or state of matter life.
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Ah sweet another project i need to join
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There’s a project that could help with that: Beach finds and Washashore · iNaturalist
I see that Diana already suggested another. However, the one i linked has over 35,000 observations.
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And also sea beans for the planty people
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There seems to be some overlap in IDers between these two projects.
I’ve encountered something that might be worse than “unknown”: “State of matter Life”. It is as unknown as “unknown”, but seems to be located at the root of the tree of life. I.e. if somebody marks something as Life and somebody else as Lepidoptera, the least common denominator is LIfe and the observation stays in the abyss forever.
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Much much better, actually.
The people who browse Life enjoy solving mysteries, and often solve them. The same people often sort unknowns too. If you haven’t a clue, please at least use life not unknown.
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Here is the problem: Person A observes a thing and labels it “Life”, Person B sees a butterfly and says “Lepidoptera”. Since the the MRCA of “Life” and “Lepidoptera” is “Life”, this becomes the community taxon and butterfly experts will never see this. Even more often this happens if someone thinks that the being is infected with species X, somebody else disagrees with X and labels the observation as the host (species Y). Unless they are related (e.g. ichneumonid wasps on a caterpillar), the community taxon becomes “Life” (e.g. if the caterpillar was suspected to suffer from a fungus or virus).
BTW, I’m one of the people who go thru unknowns (at a very low rate, more to learn myself than to really produce something, but with some success (spiders get their species mostly on the same day, and somebody seems to walk behind me and cleans American insects into finer clades)), but due to lack of knowledge I can rarely give better IDs than “Anura” or “Brassicaceae”. If it was “unknown” before, it is now a frog. But if it was “Life” before, it stays there, maybe forever (the things I’m just looking at are from early May).
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Broad IDs are only useful if - someone - chooses to work thru them.
I have built a bunch of daily URLs for problem children that I hammer thru.
Unknown we do!
Life, Plantae - they are all banished to limbo. Clogging up Needs ID where taxon specialists are filtering to ‘what I want to see’.
Broad IDs also hide from our view the observer’s placeholder. Which may have been for a missing species. Info is gone … unless you fight thru a very clunky workaround. Ain’t nobody going to do that.
That’s why I don’t say “plantae” etc.
I leave weeds alone unless I can at least say something like Brassicaceae or finer (but I haven’t yet seen refinements to that so far). For animals: frogs/spiders/birds/butterflies/beetles/bugs (they are found and refined almost immediately); rarely “insecta” (usually if the image quality is low or I can’t see the halteres/enough wings/larval legs to refine it).
I still label “fungi” because someone here said that’s OK, but maybe that’s like plants. When the observer said something specific in the comment but not in the ID field, I just leave a comment asking why the known ID wasn’t entered.
Insects get picked up and I have a list of active and competent identifiers to tag.
Fungi … trickles thru eventually, put I can put Lichen into the fast track.
I find it so interesting that you think plant people apparently never look at observations identified as Plantae. Fungi people look at Fungi, animal people are lucky that usually the observations they are interested in are already broken down into Birds, Mammals, Orthoptera, etc., (well, maybe not marine animals), but I do think plant people look at Plantae. At least I do, because I often filter my section of the world by plants, and thus see Plantae along with Garlic Mustard, Sugar Maple, Rubus, and the like.
Plus, if the professional botanists insist that Unknown plants go directly to at least family, if not genus, or just stay as Unknowns forever, that limits so much how helpful we broad identifiers can be. Sure, I can ID a fern, a conifer, even a legume, but give me a non-flowering tropical dicot with distinctive leaves - the sort of plant I am quite sure someone from the tropics can ID at a glance - and I have no idea what family it’s in.
Certainly there are MORE than enough plant observations already at species level to keep identifiers busy for the rest of our lives, but my (perhaps unnecessarily strong) desire for orderliness (but please don’t look at my house!) means I would like to see all Unknowns identified to at least Plantae, Fungi, Animalia, etc. But I’ve learned to leave South Africa alone, at least for Unknown plants, since I know so little that is helpful in the way botanists there prefer. Instead, I’ll go work on Taiwan, where the custom along many observers seems to be to upload most observations as Unknowns and leave them there forever.
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Hit the nail on the head. Thankfully, butterflies tend to move quite fast on that example, but really neat and effective summary. I agree. Use life as a go to placeholder, move down further when you can.
But how do I get Life out once it is in? Life+butterflies=Life, but unknown+butterflies=butterflies. That’s my problem.
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You can ask the person who identified the observation as Life to withdraw their ID, although of course they may never respond.
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Tag a friend and politely ask them to agree is a fast solution I use routinely, as I don’t know shit if you’ll excuse the expression. So I need iNat contacts who actually know about whatever it is they do here. Works well, friendly place we got here.
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So here’s the thing with fungi; some stuff is just going to stay there because its just weird looking amorphous brown blobs that could be any number of things and nothing short of a DNA test is going to sort it out. People post completely rotten fungi all of the time, that stuff is never going to get a good ID.
But at least putting it in fungi allows people to go through and knock the potentially identifiable observations into the right groups. If it stays in unknowns we’ll never find the fungus and just be stuck skipping past unidentifiable plants all day. The volume of plant observations is just incredibly high compared to fungi, so while ‘unknown’ might actually be useful for plant iders, its just… not for fungi.
At least, that’s my opinion. (though knock lichens into lichens if you can, I often filter those out because that’s an entirely different field of interest.)
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I can’t tell crusts on a surface apart, they might be slime molds (unrelated to anything else), fungi or lichens. Until now I mostly skipped them. I agree that over 90% of unknowns are plants.
And that’s okay, if you can’t tell the difference its no big deal - even putting a slime mold into fungi on accident is no biggie because it’ll get put in the right spot, especially if you’re generally quick about withdrawing maverick IDs.
Generally if it looks green and vaguely leafy or scaley its probably a lichen, crust fungus tend to be brown or white or various early tones (red, orange, yellow, etc) and look either blobby or toothy. Slime molds run the gamut. Obviously these are very loose rules of thumb.
EDIT: Honestly, I fully don’t understand the utility of not putting plants into plantae. Like, yeah, its a mess of unidentified plant leaves, sure… but so is unknown? Whats the difference? Do people really hate getting notifications for broad identifications so badly? Maybe they should take better pictures?
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That’s not the case, because the observation taxon would be Lepidoptera and, for better or worse, searches use the observation taxon. I just tested this out on our test server. I made an observation and identified it as Life. Then with a test account I added an ID of Lepidoptera:
If I go to Identify and search for Lepidoptera to ID, that observation comes up:
(Yes, it’s a photo of a bee, but it was a photo I had on hand)
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