I guess my pet peeve on iNat would be people who change ID’s with no explanation. If my ID is changed, I would appreciate some thoughts as to why it is wrong. I know folks are busy, but a little explanation along the lines of ‘it’s not x, it’s y because…’. It helps me learn.
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I would estimate that earnest reservations about the degree of granularity and how that tracks with evolution and the species concept make up a tiny proportion of complaints! It’s the ‘resistant to any change’ set that bothers me
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well yeah, i don’t love that either but to be fair some of the changes have been really super granular and cryptic and it doesn’t help dealing with the extreme opposite either. The intense genetic research and stuff is really neat and really important in understanding evolution and ecology but something like creating a ton of cryptic species or microspecies really breaks the use of the concept of species for most field ecology and citizen science work unless very careful attention is paid to subsection and even then, its a database and outreach nightmare.
Always a balance though. I want to know the true evolutionary pathways and subpopulations, I just don’t think they always need to be fully separated out species.
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This is such a good reminder, I’ve been trying to do better about this. I’ve taken to copy pasting my explanation when I’m specifically looking through something that is often misidentified as the same thing
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My biggest pet peeve with other naturalists in my area of the heavily forested eastern US is that beyond thinking about species presence/absence, trees are often more or less just scenery to folks focused on birds, herbaceous plants, mammals etc to the point of not noticing differences between younger, more disturbed forests and old forests. Organizations will own preserves and boast about their highest bird count but don’t recognize or know about the old-growth forest fragment on it (hence the warblers?), or botanist friends who go out of their way to visit certain high-floristic-quality sites (usually associated with old-growth or minimally disturbed forests around here) but have the woods on their personal property timbered regularly “for forest health” (they don’t need the money, but they’ve bought the concept).
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My pet peeve is people who decide to do “restoration” projects without bothering to actually know how the local ecosystem works. Which seems to be most of them…
I see it all the time: a relative healthy environment that has some invasive species, so they decide to remove the invasive with heavy machinery and herbicides, churn up the ground, spread something for erosion control that’s full of horrid invasive grass seeds, plant some ‘native’ plants that are from an ecosystem 200 miles away, and walk away feeling great about their work. The plantings die immediately because they’re planted in the wrong spot, wrong climate, and the work was done in the middle of July and never got watered. And then the whole area turns into a lifeless patch of invasive grasses.
The Environmental Studies department at my school did one (you’d think they’d know better) along the creek on campus. Brought in a brush masticator to clear the blackberries, and everything else, but never bothered to study how all the local songbirds were using the blackberry thickets for food and nesting. There used to be hundreds of species along the creek; now there are just a few migratory sparrows and california towhees.
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People who say things like, “Yes, it has every morphological indicator for X, but it simply can’t be X, because X hasn’t been recorded from this location before!” I’m always like, well, yeah…it’s called “discovery” ladies and gentlemen…
(Not talking about way out-of-range observations, although even in those cases I think it’s more helpful to point out distinguishing morphological characters when offering a disagreeing ID.)
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This,100%. It’s almost always someone who’s bristling at change, or worse, sees it as an affront to their “authority”. It’s especially funny to me when the change they hate is actually a reversion to a name that had been in use much longer. (Very much not talking about people like @charlie, who give pragmatic, thoughtful, and evidence-based reasons for wanting to keep things lumped rather than split.)
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Not taking a picture of the underside of a mushroom 
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You’ll find as you get older and more cantankerous that your peeves will multiply. Best not to keep them all – they can be high maintenance, like having too many pets. Hold the big ones close because they’ve been your companions for a lifetime, but let the little ones go free. ;-)
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not everyone has had the same opportunities to learn and understand, and i think ignorance should be seen as an opportunity. just because someone might be older than you doesn’t mean they should know what you do by now.
unless you mean like, aggressive, intentional ignorance? in which case that’s across all ages and i think older people (especially boomers? do people even know theres a generation between millennials and boomers?) get all of that unfairly attributed to them as if there aren’t millenials that also definitely act like that.
i like hanging out with people older than me honestly
as for my peeve, people who can’t be wrong. always.
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When it comes to iNat, one of my biggest peeves is blurry photos of mostly-rotten mushrooms taken from above (no photos of gills, etc.). These things are virtually impossible to identify!
@mamestraconfigurata older means more time to learn, not just “old”, and I said that only to say it’s okay for teens to be focused on one thing and forget about others, while modern adult wants to be comprehensively (not sure if the word is right, translator doesn’t help me) intelligent (in stuff the person likes, but preferably for ME that would be something enviromental, as I don’t see life without well, other life, and I can’t understand people who refuse to do it, clearly can’t keep up reltionships with them (bare fact, not like I’m against someone, I try and fail every year).
And definitely I have no style, more like I have no idea how to express my thoughts in English or even Russian and that always leads to numerous disputes that’s bad for my nerves, so probably I’m gonna stop saying anything one day.
@kuchipatchis what’s those “???” are about? I wrote about different things and can’t help but complain why everyoone you think that I wrote about “незнание” while I meant “невежество”. Nothing wrong in not knowing something. I saw a couple with a boy who caught a toad, put it in a jar and started throwing around, I asked them to stop it and they said it’s just a toad, how would you call that?
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(I read these and wince after each one. :-) Is this the right moment for a blanket apology?)
My pet peeve about naturalist guides: describing an organism as being “medicinal” (or worse, “edible/medicinal”) without explaining what the purported effects are.
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You mean that you hate vague hints about medicinal benefits more than you hate bad keys??
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My biggest pet peeve has got to be people who add a bad identification and will not engage afterward to discuss the possibility of changing their mind after repeatedly being tagged. Nothing frustrates me more than that.
I guess being tagged for observations of organisms I don’t know anything is annoying too, but I understand and try to take it as a compliment. Engaging with other naturalists is essentially the main point of the platform after all!
All the other things mentioned are at least halfway tolerable to me. :-)
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oh that’s horrible :( some people just have no compassion for animals that aren’t “cute”. I could add that to peeves of mine. even plenty of “animal lovers” stop somewhere, at some point an animal is just too ugly or un-relatable for them to care about it any more.
I’m sorry about the mis-translation issue. I’m trying to look up those words right now and everything is acting like they’re the same thing which I can assume is wrong or else you would not have bothered specifying the difference.
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I wouldn’t describe it as a “peeve” exactly because I know people mean well and are trying to help, but I always become self-conscious when I’m looking around closely for insects, plants, frogs, etc. and someone asks me if I’ve lost something. Usually, unless I’ve spied something really cool (to me anyway), I end up walking away because I suddenly feel silly.
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Ugh, this drives me crazy as well. There is already SO much bad information out there on the purported medicinal effects of things, and it takes a huge amount of research to sort out the things that are actually useful from all the bullshit.
“Ooh, it’s MEDICINAL.” You know what else is medicinal? Everything in my bathroom medicine cabinet, but that doesn’t mean you should go swallowing pills willy-nilly!
I also hate the people who see a new plant or mushroom and just ask “Oh, what’s it good for?” Not everything exists for us to use or eat…
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