Insect Identification

black saddlebags dragonfly

It often happens on my adventures that I see an insect or arachnid I would like to know more about, but I don’t know what to call it. It is times like these that I make a lot of internet searches using descriptive words, but sometimes I just can’t find what I’m looking for. This is why I recently bought the Insect Identification app for the iphone. Once open, I can select a photograph from my gallery, center and crop it, and ask for identification. The AI on the servers will do its best to match my photo with another photo it has in its database. It is often right. The photos it pulled up to match the dragonfly above are practically identical. Apparently, it is called the black saddlebags dragonfly.

carrion beetles

Even though the app authors recommend identifying insects by taking a photograph of a single one so as not to confuse the AI, it still does a pretty good job when this is impossible. The trio of beetles on the tree it identified as carrion beetles. The photograph it provided was the spitting image of mine.

What are you?

While Insect Identification works amazing wonders even under less-than-ideal conditions, sometimes it just does dumb things. I don’t know if it is because of a bug in the software or because not all insects are in the database yet or because it simply needs more feedback to refine its algorithms, but some matches are just clearly wrong. The animal on the ground it recognized as some sort of cricket. I still don’t know what it is, but I think it might be some sort of dipluran. The picture the app provided was not even close.

The bottom line is that Insect Identifier cannot be relied on for life-and-death decisions, but it is easier and faster than online identification guides or Google image searches. I expect to use it a lot this coming spring. The twenty-first century is getting off to an amazing start.