Experimenting with the "Seek" app on my iPhone
I've been trying the Seek App on my iPhone for about a week. It's pretty decent at identifying many species in a diverse group of organisms. Can be really bad with butterflies and dragonflies, but otherwise comes close to spot on for most species. Several glaring blunders - it apparently defaults to Canadian tiger swallowtail for any yellow swallowtails in Michigan, even when way out of range. Similarly tanked on a Red-spotted purple, calling it a Pipevine Swallowtail (not know from where the photo was taken).
Also a strange issue was with an Ashy clubtail - three consecutive photos resulted in three species. With a little effort I knew that it was Ashy. So, I'd be careful using it with unkown dragonflies and directly posting.
Another strange thing happened with a tiger moth that it assigned to Spilosoma lubricipeda, a Eurasian species not found near Lake Superior in Michigan. Otherwise it's been spot on for most moths, which is quite surprising, especially for the micros that were identified to species, although many were id'd to genus.
Most plants were id'd properly, even without a flower. So, that can be helpful. So ids even surprised me, which is OK. Fern id was usually to species level, but nor always. It even worked with Botrycium. Orchids were mostly to species. But I was surprised when it could not id Hooker's Orchid.
So, I'll keep experimenting with everybody hopefully tolerating this.
