Diario de tasty_y

Something I think could be improved about the design of INat, as a website.

Problem: what I call "senseless caution", both from the human identifiers and the AI: IDing something as a single-species taxon, instead of that species, for example "genus Elona" instead of "Elona quimperiana", or I think "Class Ginkgoopsida" is a striking example with only Ginkgo biloba in it. There's never a reason to register such IDs and they can always be improved without any loss of accuracy. (Logically this should apply to the single genus families and so on, all single-descendant taxons.)

Solution 1: hardcode AI to straight up never recommend single-species taxons and recommend more precise ones instead. Indeed, many such IDs come from silly automatic recommendations.
(More controversially: to be honest, I'd like to go further and forbid AI to ever suggest "Genus Cornu", "Genus Arianta" and the like. Giant waste of time, that.)

Solution 2: Put an "Improve" button on the ID form (next to "Agree" and "Compare") that will only appear on the senselessly cautious IDs. Pressing it would automatically register an ID of the single species in the taxon that appeared in the original ID. (That is: you press the "Improve" button on a "genus Elona" ID and it automatically adds an "Elona quimperiana" ID.)

Solution 3, low impact: add an icon to the senselessly cautious ID (perhaps a blue exclamation point). It would do nothing at all, except that when you moused over it you'd see a text along the lines of: "This identification could be improved without any loss of accuracy by replacing it with taxon such and such." Purely informative.

Objection: I can't think of any strong objections, but you could say: "what if we replace all "genus Elona" with "Elona quimperiana", and then a new Elona species is described, or a taxanomic change happens. Then a clean-up will be required." I think this is reasonable but in practice much less of an annoyance than the one that senseless caution currently creates.

(Not posting this on the forum)

Didn't find any Rangia cuneata today, but saw plenty of dark red sand on the beach today. It's not a rare, but a temporary phenomena: when the waves come at a certain speed at a certain angle, they drag the sand particles along the bottom, and the more heavy and dense grains are less prone to moving so they accumulate in some places and you get these bruise-colored patches of deposits. It's the same process as the one that was used to extract gold from sand in the past. Garnet happens to be quite dense, so it's one of the minerals that tends to accumulate in the fashion. Here's what it looks like:

I collected some samples and put them under magnification:

Turned out there were lots of grains of all sorts of colors. Pink and orange ones are garnets, I assume, and the occasional green ones - olivine. Colorless grains are ordinary quartz, but what could the really dark ones be? Maybe they came from basalt or something.

For two hours our fishing proceeded energetically but without bringing up any rarities. Our dragnet was filled with Midas abalone, harp shells, obelisk snails, and especially the finest hammer shells I had seen to that day. We also gathered in a few sea cucumbers, some pearl oysters, and a dozen small turtles that we saved for the ship’s pantry.

But just when I least expected it, I laid my hands on a wonder, a natural deformity I’d have to call it, something very seldom encountered. Conseil had just made a cast of the dragnet, and his gear had come back up loaded with a variety of fairly ordinary seashells, when suddenly he saw me plunge my arms swiftly into the net, pull out a shelled animal, and give a conchological yell, in other words, the most piercing yell a human throat can produce.

“Eh? What happened to master?” Conseil asked, very startled. “Did master get bitten?”

“No, my boy, but I’d gladly have sacrificed a finger for such a find!”

“What find?”

“This shell,” I said, displaying the subject of my triumph.

“But that’s simply an olive shell of the Oliva porphyria species, genus Oliva, order Pectinibranchia, class Gastropoda, branch Mollusca—”

“Yes, yes, Conseil! But instead of coiling from right to left, this olive shell rolls from left to right!”

“It can’t be!” Conseil exclaimed.

“Yes, my boy, it’s a left-handed shell!”

“A left-handed shell!” Conseil repeated, his heart pounding.

“Look at its spiral!”

“Oh, master can trust me on this,” Conseil said, taking the valuable shell in trembling hands, “but never have I felt such excitement!”

And there was good reason to be excited! In fact, as naturalists have ventured to observe, “dextrality” is a well-known law of nature. In their rotational and orbital movements, stars and their satellites go from right to left. Man uses his right hand more often than his left, and consequently his various instruments and equipment (staircases, locks, watch springs, etc.) are designed to be used in a right-to-left manner. Now then, nature has generally obeyed this law in coiling her shells. They’re right-handed with only rare exceptions, and when by chance a shell’s spiral is left-handed, collectors will pay its weight in gold for it.