It is the swim bladder of a pufferfish. Something occasionally found when beachcombing. Now, what would the appropriate annotation for evidence of presence should be? Not a bone, not a scat, not a track… could it be ‘‘organism’’? At least partially? It still doesn’t convince me since, although it is a part of an organism, a bone is also such.
So, would ‘‘organism’’ work? Or a new and more precise annotation should be created? I have many thoughts about annotations which I will at some point of my life (or the planet’s life at least) express on another thread, but this is a good start.
My personal understanding is that annotations serve two main purposes, and probably lots of lesser purposes, but the two main purposes are:
To help with phenology
To improve search filtering
Annotations cannot be all things to all people. You have to balance usefulness with complexity. More complexity reduces usefulness for most users. Look at observation fields, which are a chaotic mess.
What would be the use case for an annotation of “Body Part”?
It would make for interesting predation studies. E.g., wings of birds are often found alone, without the body. And different predators have different ways of dismembering their prey. But we already have “Dead, Organism” for that, IF the observation is annotated, which many are not.
This is not that different from when people post the tail of a lizard after it lost the tail. In that case I annotate it as “organism”. However, because lizards can and do lose their tails naturally without being killed, the community (I asked someone about this) annotates as “cannot be determined” for alive/dead. Obviously a swim bladder is a tad more difficult to remove without the organism being dead.