It was around the time I was focusing my smartphone's camera on the fly swimming in my glass of wine that I realized I might have a problem.
"What are you doing, Trish?" a part of my brain screamed at the rest, "That bug is going to fall in and contaminate your drink! What if you swallow it?"
So I fished the little fellow out and was very impressed when "Seek" helpfully identified the tiny creature as everyone's friend from biology class, Drosophila melanogaster. "Seek" is powerful enough to recognize a nearly microscopic half-drowned bug.
And that is why it's my new obsession. When "Seek by iNaturalist" works well, it works like something from my wildest dreams. The ability to carry a tiny computer with built-in camera in my pocket has changed the game when it comes to my wildlife observations. "Seek" changes it even further: aim it's camera at a flower or an insect or a shell and it will identify it to the best of it's ability. If it identifies the organism to species, it'll snap a picture and add it to your list of observations. You can also upload photos you've already taken; it happily identified even incredibly blurry digital photographs, and I've even had success aiming "Seek" at my vintage hard-copy photos from Discovery Island and St. James Park.
In other words, "Seek" gives you a photographic Life List. And you can bet that my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and I love having a very official-looking record of, if not every single living thing I've ever seen, then at least those I've photographed. There are rewards for identifying certain numbers of birds or snails or dicots, and there are Achievements to be, uh, achieved, and they are all incredibly satisfying. (Whether the game-ification of citizen science is good or not is a
discussion for another day. I'm fine with it since "Seek" is
extremely kid-friendly anyway.) Here's my rewards as of time of writing (a week ago), and... I'm equally impressed with and very terrified of myself right now. 😰
So there's what I love about "Seek". Now let me tell you why I've also screamed and cried and sworn at it. It is the best-worst app I've played with in a while. "Seek" crashes on a whim. It eats battery like nothing since the earliest version of "Pokemon GO". And the blasted thing doesn't know what an Okapi is:
Okay, in fairness - a lot of humans don't know what they're looking at when they see an Okapi, more's the pity. But then you get misidentifications like this:
That's... that's not a beetle...
A reoccurring problem I've had with "Seek" is that it refuses to correctly identify any of my many photographs of White-Tailed Deer, no matter the quality. So then it goes and asks if this kangaroo is a deer. 😒
Now, thankfully, as frustrating as they are, misidentifications can be deleted from your record. To end on a lighter note, the funniest incident I've had is technically not a mis-ID at all. It's just... that's not what I was trying to photograph here?
And, since we're in New England here, I have to share my funniest ID so far:
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Art of the Day!
T'is a Catbird! How Cute!
So, how about that "Matrix Resurrections" trailer...? O.O
