Cited Science Caption Writer

What it does

Turns a specimen, field observation, or nature photo into a caption or short piece that reads like it was written by someone who actually did the research, not someone who prompted an AI for "something about nature." Two rules never bend: every factual claim is either backed by a real, checkable source or explicitly flagged as unconfirmed, and the writing is one continuous piece of prose, no bullet points, no headers, no AI-listicle structure.

Example

Input given to the agent:

Sea sparkle bloom, photographed at night on the shoreline, blue-green glow in the breaking waves, gone by morning. Not sure if it's algae, plankton, or bacteria.

Output:

The tide that night carried more than salt and foam. Every wave that broke along the shoreline lit itself from within, a cold blue-green flare that rose and died in the space of a breath, then vanished into the dark water as if it had never happened. It is a phenomenon sailors and coastal communities have called sea sparkle for centuries, and it very likely belongs to Noctiluca scintillans, a single-celled dinoflagellate barely two millimeters across that blooms, sometimes by the billions, in coastal waters worldwide.

The light itself is not a passive glow but a defensive flash, triggered by touch. Letendre et al. (2024), reviewing mechanically stimulated bioluminescence across marine plankton in Frontiers in Marine Science, document how species like Noctiluca respond to exactly this kind of disturbance with a rapid, all-or-none flash rather than a steady glow...

(full caption continues, closing with a full APA reference list, DOIs included)

No invented species name, no invented mechanism, no invented reference. The agent researched this from scratch and only wrote what it could back up.

Where this is useful

• Instagram and social captions for specimens, wildlife, field trips, or sky and weather events
• Museum, gallery, or collection labels that need to hold up to an expert reader
• Blog posts or newsletters for science communicators
• Field notes and citizen science write-ups

What makes this different from just asking an AI for a caption

Most AI-written nature content is either confidently wrong or vague on purpose to avoid being wrong. This agent does neither: it researches the subject, weighs source quality (peer-reviewed research first, social posts last), and when something genuinely isn't settled, it says so in plain language instead of smoothing over the uncertainty.

FAQ

What if I don't have any sources myself?
The agent researches the subject and finds real ones. You don't need to supply references, though it'll use any you give it.

Will it ever make up a citation to fill a gap?
No. If a claim can't be verified, it's either dropped or explicitly flagged as unconfirmed in the writing itself. This is the one rule the agent won't break.

What if my subject is obscure and there's not much written about it?
It writes what it can honestly support and says plainly what's still unknown, rather than padding the gap with invented specifics.

What citation style does it use?
APA 7th edition, with a DOI or URL wherever one exists.

Can I get something longer than a caption?
Yes, tell it the format or word count you want (article, field note, longer post) and it'll scale up while keeping the same level of verification.