notthebarnacles

[notthebarnacles]

Xipholeptos notoides

don’t care didn’t ask (adheres self to blade of seagrass)

[notthebarnacles]

Insane how they exclude any mention of AI in the blog post title. If someone doesn’t read the post, they might just assume “oh, they’re improving the CV, nice” but nope, a hallucinating algorithm replacing what users (like me, who spends plenty of time studying and explaining my IDs) work so hard to do out of love for their work. They know they’ll get backlash, why else would they hide it (shame?) and excuse it (“we already use AI!” not genAI, they all know there’s a difference)?

It just seems like it’s all for the money… the cost is going completely against what this platform stood for and what their most passionate users would honestly want. This is the best citizen science website I’ve used, and now what? What does it mean now? “Haha, why not make the machines tell us how to identify animals! It’s not like there hasn’t been centuries of people studying biota that already has established most of this knowledge!” It’s ridiculous and tone-deaf. I cannot imagine the damage this could cause on a website that totes itself as scientific.

I hope they wisen up.

Love to see iNaturalist betraying the goodwill of thousands of volunteers that help identify peoples' observations in exchange for a grant from Google's AI slop department!

Love how the FAQ says that iNaturalist has already been using "a type of AI" to help offer identifications for photos, as if that's even remotely similar to using a fucking LLM to try and give accurate species identification "tips".

Because that sounds like an amazing idea, especially since the experts on this site spend their entire lives studying certain taxa to differentiate between species. Let's act like these volunteers WOULDN'T want to write these tips, like they haven't been asking for a user-run wiki for years. I think instead we should just use their time to train our model. Which, by the way, doesn't fucking care if the "tips" its giving are even accurate, no matter how much training you give it.

And I won't even get into the other ethical concerns of all of this.

We're truly deeply rooted in an age of misinformation and disinformation. We need to advocate for better and more accessible science communication now, more than ever. If you use iNaturalist at all, you NEED to speak up about this.

[notthebarnacles]

are you fucking kidding me

[notthebarnacles]

what the fuck.

[notthebarnacles]

It doesn't matter how many photos I take, it always feels like the first time. Think this is a Broadclub Cuttlefish.

Pulau Hantu, Singapore, 2025

[notthebarnacles]

"cuttlefish feeding" (source)

[notthebarnacles]

help people on the last post being like "who is possibly having drama on iNaturalist" buddy you have no idea. every single corner of that website is mired in drama that you cant even imagine. every identifier leaderboard is regularly having hatfield and mccoy level schisms. there are published experts getting into heated arguements dozens of comments long under a bad cellphone photo of a snake. every power user has a list of at least 3 other users who they would physically fight in an instant given the opportunity.

you took a bunch of people who are all insanely intense about extremely niche topics and put them in the same website, what did you expect? its a miracle we stop long enough to identify anything

and we're still not as bad as bugguide

[notthebarnacles]

Absolutely miffed about that AI generated squid post in the squid tag getting so popular.

No, squids can’t make little glowing shark patterns appear on their body. That’s also not effective camouflage. You have to mimic the silhouette itself, you don’t plaster the silhouette all over your body. From a distance, you’d just look like a glittery snack in the vast open ocean.

Mostly every squid that has photophores on their mantle uses them to blend in with light coming from above, not to stand out.

If you wanted to get technical, the image doesn’t look like a squid either. There are no fins, and the head and mantle are dorsally fused. midwater octopus alert

[notthebarnacles]

YIPPEE!! behold my devious notes. sorry if tumblr crunches these 💔 Bobtails and bottletails

Cuttlefish

Squids (I love diamondback squid 💙)

(I also forgot to mention the "clown squid" is a juvenile Leachia pacifica oopsies. They have long eyestalks when they're babies 💙) Octopuses

Hello!! I stumbled on this blog by accident but I love the cephalopods so much. fellow splatoon fan turned squid nerd 🤝

Just asking would it be okay if I corrected some of the identifications here? It’s no big deal I just thrive off of meticulously identifying these iconic critters. A lot

Absolutely!! Anybody is always free to point out a mistake I've made with any cephalopod I do!! I would much rather be corrected than not know :3

I always try my best to get it accurate with the research I do, but I know not everything I see is going to be fully accurate yknow??

Glad there are many splatoon fans that also got really fascinated with cephalopods :)

[notthebarnacles]

I have a feeling that if they add playable cuttlefish to Splatoon it’s incredibly likely to be based off some Acanthosepion species. Makes perfect sense but I will be having nightmares about the idea of the hauntingly widespread pharaoh cuttlefish being playable in funny mollusk game. Don’t scare me like that.

Other options?? Sepiella japonica. Ascarosepion latimanus. Literally any Doratosepion species; the biodiversity of that cuttlefish group is WILD. Ridiculously narrow cuttlefish. Cuttlefish with two tails. Cuttlefish with long arms curled up into springs. Cuttlefish that are actually masseurs (what?). Most of them have iridescent markings that look like angry eyebrows?! Yes please. I want this

this concludes today’s late night cephaloposting. back to my usual silence (unless?)

[notthebarnacles]

i don't get how some people hate the fact that all mammals are basically extinct in splatoon. yes this is a take i come across at times. its genuinely one of my favorite parts of the setting. "it doesnt make sense that they died" ok. and the 12000 year span that led to fish evolving to swim in the air does? if you can think of a reasoning for that, then surely you can think of reasons for all the mammals to have died. the game literally gives you several. "but what about their dairy products? or stuff like animal hides?" they have agriculture, countless fish and crustacean species that are still animal-like, and thousands of years of history. there's so many options. mammal characters dominate just about every other piece of media with anthropomorphic animal characters. Please just let splatoon have this <3

[notthebarnacles]

The old man of the sea. It has been a few years since I encounter the bigger cuttlefish here. This one was about 30cm long.

Pulau Hantu, Singapore, 2025

[notthebarnacles]

hey! was wondering if the japanese dialogue for squid vs octopus says that non-anthropomorphic octopuses are extinct?

「イカとタコって 歴史の授業で習ったぞ！ スッゲー昔に 海に住んでた生き物だろ？」 (I learned about squids and octopuses in history class! Weren't they these creatures that lived in the ocean a looong time ago?) ワタシも習ったことあります！ いろんな料理に使われてたんですよね～！」 (I also leaned about them! Weren't they used in all sorts of cuisine~?)

yes jp dialogue for this splatfest skips any mention of the theme being "controversial" and instead has talk of squids and octopus as food.

curiously, there are real ass aquatic octopuses shown in mako mart seafood advertisements. either the splatfest was lying, this is an oversight, or something darker is happening. The splatfest also implies squids are extinct. Though in regards to the existence of aquatic squids, nogami had this to say a few months before the splatfest in question

So if Inklings eat fish, I asked, do they eat squids? “Inklings in this world are an evolved form of the squids in our world,” said Nogami. “Things like the food chain still exist.” Nogami said it’s possible that squids exist in Inkopolis the way they do IRL, adding that, if they do, “it’s definitely possible that an Inkling could potentially eat squids.”

i personally think it would make a LOT of sense for aquatic squids and octopuses to exist as they do IRL, as the same is true for a lot of sea creatures in Splatoon. but because of Squid vs. Octopus that probably isn't the case... The status of whether marine squids and octopuses are extinct or not is one of the few actually inconsistent things in splatoon. (and yes splatoon's lore is consistent if youre looking at the japanese version)

[notthebarnacles]

who are these fools

[notthebarnacles]

Octopus micropyrsus

[notthebarnacles]

so apparently THIS is what bathothauma lyromma looks like in situ............I'm losing it

it feels so weird to see, because my only reference for what an adult looked like was one illustration. now I feel like I've seen something I'm not meant to see

🥹🥹🥹🥹

original video (twitter)

[notthebarnacles]

Same cuttlefish, different poses

Pulau Hantu, Singapore, 2025