I came across the game Metazoa (found at https://metazooa.com/) and its plant version Metaflora (found at https://flora.metazooa.com/) from a newsletter recently. It’s a taxonomy game. You try to guess the animal or plant, and the game will provide the highest level of taxonomy the mystery animal/plant and your guess have in common. I’m really enjoying it. Not only do I have fun trying to guess another asterid or bony fish, but I’m learning taxonomy as well. I will say, they use taxonomy categories from Wikipedia, so they don’t always line up with what’s used on iNaturalist, but that doesn’t take away from the enjoyment. Anyone else playing? What do you think of the games? Personally, I find the plant one harder than the animal version.
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I play occasionally. It’s fun. The thing I don’t like is, the taxa are either not very specific (spider), or very specific (great white shark).
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I agree. Sometimes it’s hard to guess the organism that fits the category. As in, I know it’s a bird, but what kind of birds are in the system.
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I tried it just now, and ‘won’ but I didn’t find it that well done. Knowing it was a placental mammal, I typed “tiger” and hit guess and it autofilled “tiger prawn” even though “tiger” was available. The autofill tried to do unhelpful things like this several times, which seems like it should be easily fixable. I also found it annoying that, because it is based on Linnean ranks, almost every group is a false polytomy (all immediate daughter taxa of each grouping are falsely assumed to be equally closely related). This would be a lot more work to fix, as it would require assembling (and then updating) a massive phylogeny.
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Ditto. Other games that might interest you include:
(That is effectively what I do, when I ID Unknowns. And currently wading thru Needs ID - Araneae next.)
But I have the benefit of adding a (very) few valid IDs to the Needs ID on iNat. And live feedback from taxon specialists. For my Diptera batch I won one Synolcus. It is a brutal learning curve which shows me, exactly, where my knowledge fits into the taxonomy. Rather broadly right, than narrowly wrong.
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I enjoy metazoa a lot, especially if you’re mostly interested in one group it’s nice to put everything into place more broadly. It could benefit from some tidying up and some of the name choices are not ideal.
I’ve never played metaflora because I wouldn’t be able to get past ‘angiosperm’.
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Rose? Daisy? Lavender? ?
Yeah daisy was my go-to and then I gave up after that
Daisy is at least a family. I am swimming thru endless animal orders - with just a few obs in each order - ‘cannot ID further due to inadequate photos’ or simply ‘cannot ID from photos’. They say.
I feel your pain, I tend to stick to IDing ‘unknown’, as that is the depth of my knowledge.
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