I frequently browse identifications of salmonid fishes, and I’ve noticed a persistent issue. I frequently see identifications of organisms ranging from mosses to fungi and insects all initially IDed as the large Arctic whitefish Stenodus nelma. Checking locations, these strange IDs always seem to come out of French-speaking areas, and I’ve realized this is likely due to the fish’s common name, Inconnu, meaning “unknown” in French. I’m assuming that these people are accidentally using this ID as a placeholder when they don’t know what else to put, and I’m curious about what might help prevent this sort of mix up in the future.
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Wow, that’s quite a unique problem! In general, iNat supports common names in multiple languages because this helps people correctly identify the organisms they see. While “inconnu” does seem to be one genuine common name for Stenodus (not clear if it’s just applied to S. nelma or also to S. leucichthys), it isn’t the only one (English Wikipedia lists nelma, sheefish, siifish and connie as four others). So it’s not like we don’t have alternatives.
Also, it seems that “inconnu” is listed on iNat as an English common name, but is probably showing up for French-speakers because there are no common names listed for any variant of French.
Unless someone with good knowledge of this species can tell us that “inconnu” is the most common common name in English, I would support removing it entirely. If, however, there is a case to keep it, then there are a couple of things we can do to address the confusion:
- Add common names in French (and maybe Français du Canada), so that these show up in preference for users with French language settings.
- Change the priority of the English common names to make “inconnu” last.
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Inconnu is the only widely accepted common name for this species. Other names are used as well, as is the case with nearly all fish but to remove it entirely would be unquestionably the wrong move.
According The American Fisheries Society the French common name for Inconnu is… Inconnu. So adding the French common name probably doesn’t help the problem.
Sheefish does have a fairly high degree of recognition as a common name for this fish so putting that at first priority and Inconnu at second would not be unreasonable, though it would not well match the frequency of use in the real world.
As a person who also identifies a lot of coregonid fish, I do see this somewhat regularly but it isn’t that much more common than other weird identifications. For example Lomandra obliqua (a plant called Fish Bones) often is label applied to the bones of fish. Monocentridae (Pinecone Fishes) is often used to identify the seed-bearing organ on gymnosperm plants. The fish family Scatophagidae (Scats) being applied to all manner of definitely-not-fish scat. None are that much of a burden to correct and deviating from naming conventions to address issues with misunderstanding users is not a good solution.
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Thanks @nf4t. Your knowledge on this is really helpful. It does seem that there aren’t really any easy fixes for this one.
I assume that the misuse of this name mostly happens when a French-speaking observer types “Inconnu” in the French version of the “What did you see?” box. If so, then promoting “Sheefish” above “Inconnu” wouldn’t really fix the problem.
This may be the key point here. I see that there are currently 61 observations with at least one ID as Stenodus nelma. Of those, 29 are definitely not fish. That’s not great, but it doesn’t seem like a huge problem. It may be that the best solution is for fish identifiers to just assist the occasional confused Francophone with finding a better ID and leave it at that.
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The other species in the genus is Stenodus leucichthys. Of its names, leucichthys (Greek), whitefish (“freshwater whitefish” refers to the subfamily), belorybitsa (Russian), and aqbalyq (at least three Turkic languages) all mean the same.
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I left notes in French on some of the non-fish asking them to change their ID.
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One of those non-fish obs appeared in my feed: [link removed by mod] . I tagged the observer twice, but I seem to be beeting a dead fish. He’s still active. Is there a better way to get his attention?
send a personal message
if no response, tag other users to add IDs