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Identify a bug

How We Identify

What happens to your photograph, where the facts come from, and what we check before a danger claim goes on the site.

What happens to your photo

The photograph is resized in your browser, sent to our identifier, and deleted the moment we have answered. We keep a hash of the image and the resulting identification — never the image itself. The hash lets us return an instant answer if the same photograph is submitted again, and it cannot be turned back into a picture.

How the identification works

A vision model examines the photograph against a written identification guide covering body plan, leg count and arrangement, eye arrangement, wing structure and markings — the same characters a field key uses. Where it helps, the identifier magnifies specific regions of the photograph to check a character before committing to a group, rather than judging the whole frame at once.

It answers at the most precise rank the photograph honestly supports. Some animals cannot be taken to species from a photograph at all — hobo spiders famously need a microscope — so a family-level answer there is the correct answer, not a failure.

The safety rule

Identification precision and danger assessment are separate problems, and we treat them separately. If the identification is uncertain and the animal falls in a group containing something medically significant, we will not publish a harmless verdict — regardless of what the model concluded. That check is a fixed rule in our code, not an instruction the model can overlook.

The full detail, including what we still get wrong, is on accuracy & limits.

Where the species facts come from

Every record on this site carries the sources its identity and danger claims were checked against, with the date they were checked, shown at the bottom of the page. A record cannot be published without them — that is enforced when the site is built, not by someone remembering.

What we don’t do

We don’t give medical advice, and we don’t recommend pesticides. This is an identification site. If you have been bitten or stung and symptoms develop, see a doctor — and if something is in your house that you want gone, identifying it correctly is the first step, but the removal is somebody else’s trade.