What I think is a “watermelon slushy sensory stress relief squeeze toy” (identified via Google Images) has been (mis)identified as a fruit. How should I treat this.
change the identification to Homo sapiens (it’s an observation of a human artefact)?
downvote “evidence of organism” and “recent evidence of organism”?
The general consensus (keyword: general) seems to match @sedgequeen:
with many people saying they downvote “evidence of organism” instead (and only, not “recent evidence”, which is for fossils, I believe) if the intention of the observer seems to have been to show life present (mistaking something manmade for living, for example).
First of all Google Lens is not a person, not your own knowledge, so please don’t make any ID’s based exclusively on Google Lens results.
If you are independently certain it is not a living or once living organism, but a manmade object, I think either identifying as Homo sapiens or marking no evidence of organism are equally valid. I believe people who use the former are generally being somewhat humorous, but it’s technically accurate.
I would leave “recent evidence of organism” alone - that’s really for when there is evidence, but it isn’t recent (like a fossil.)
I agree that either marking the toy Homo sapiens or marking it “no evidence of organism” gets the observation out of Needs ID so either one is acceptable. However, the toy actually is evidence of Homo sapiens, so I prefer that. I’m not being humorous (not intentionally, anyway) when I say that. (Though I admit I’ve sometimes posted a plastic flamingo or life-size metal dinosaur in order to initiate a humorous series of comments.)
I have to admit commenting on this reminds me of talking with my colleagues in our small consulting business. We always seemed to have the longest, fiercest arguments when we basically agreed but with some slightly different nuance.
I was pretty sure that it was an artefact (I was thinking some sort of dog toy, or a ball mangled into unrecognisability); Google Images found the particular product, sold on Shein.
As far as I know, the official guidance is to ID as evidence of humans, not mark as no evidence of organism.
One advantage to this is that the observation (and image) is not left incorrectly labelled as some organism it is not. Even though the DQA makes the observation casual, it is still possible that people might find and see the incorrectly labelled observation and not understand that the label in fact doesn’t apply. So re-IDing seems strongly preferable to me. There is an observation field for “fake organism taxon” for those who wish to record what organism the object was mistaken for.
This is correct. A plastic toy is what it is. Evidence of human. And any human obs defaults to Casual – which is a plus.
No use having that come up as a Casual obs of … was it watermelon in this case ? There are some very odd images scattered across taxon pictures.
It was identified as Cola. I would have said that Capsicum annuum (sweet pepper) was a more plausible misidentification.
Do both, it is possible. Add an id of human and downvote those two.
The way I imagine it, if we landed on an alien planet and found a toy there, we’d absolutely say we found evidence of organisms on the planet. A toy found on earth is similarly evidence of the organism “Homo sapiens”, and should be marked as such. “Evidence of organism” in my mind is only for photos where there’s nothing biological or biologically-constructed visible (i.e. just a rock or a rainbow or a cloud) or the image quality is so poor that it’s unclear what it shows (i.e. it’s just a blob).