To most native English speakers (I speak from the UK), the colloquial use of ‘bug’ more or less means ‘non-marine arthropod’, or ‘general creepy-crawly’. I mean spiders, beetles, woodlice, flies, centipedes, the lot. I have encountered perfectly well educated, technically minded people who are surprised to learn that ‘bug’ can have a technical meaning referring to a particular group of insects.
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“Daddy Long Legs” can refer either to harvestmen, cellar spiders, or crane flies.
I honestly like “bug” as a colloquialism. It’s a good word to get the general idea across. If I need to refer to actual bugs, “true bug” seems to be a generally accepted way to specify those.
A lot of people seem to not really have a clear idea of what a coral is. They think it’s maybe something like a plant, and are surprised if you show them one and explain that it’s an animal. Double surprised if you feed a sea anemone for them to watch and it curls in on the food like the living animal it is.
(I have a reef aquarium with captive-grown corals and anemones.)
Also, birds are reptiles, dinosaurs are reptiles, and birds are the avian dinosaurs that survived the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
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this cladogram is correct, but try showing this to somebody who is unfamiliar with vertebrate taxonomy
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Birds are dinosaurs and whales are hoofed animals and also fish! Lots of fun haha.
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GASTROPODS
A very basic mistake that a lot of people (including many otherwise well-educated adults) make, is to believe that a snail can exit its shell and wander around without one, like a slug.
I think that misapprehension originates in the fact that in children’s stories the shell is referred to as the snail’s “home”, not its skeleton.
During the long and interesting evolution of the gastropod lineages, losing the shell is something that occurred many time, at many different points, so there are numerous different families of slugs which are not closely related to one another at all; i.e. “slug” is not a taxonomic category.
Most people also have no idea that gastropods are the class of invertebrate organisms which are second only to insects in terms of the number of different species that exist and have existed in the geological past.
Because the shells fossilize so well, the evolutionary history of shelled mollusks is mostly quite well understood.
There are shelled and shell-less gastropods in saltwater, in freshwater and on land. They have colonized almost every kind of habitat.
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Cuttlefish and octopus are molluscs not fishes.
ants and termites are 2 different things
bhraminy blind snake is often confused with earthworms but it’s not a earthworm.
Silverfish is not a fish,
sea cucumber is not a cucumber.
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I guess in primates lemurs and bushbabies also come, it is still interesting to know that we are connected
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Yup, there’re two big groups: moist-nosed primates with lemurs, lorises and galagos, and dry-nosed primates, with all the monkeys and tarsiers. They have really interesting history of evolution, probably we could add tarsiers being in a “lemur group” as common mistake as it was a science view of things for quite some time!
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somewhere there are box turtles. Which live in boxes?
In South Africa turtles swim in the sea, tortoises walk on land. Then I discovered freshwater terrapins.
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That is where and how I learned to use the difference of the words tortoise and turtle. It was all turtles for me before (we do not make a difference in German language, whether Testudinata live on land or in water)
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On the monkeys/apes confusion: the correct inclusive grouping is the infraorder Simiiformes or more commonly Simians. This includes the Platyrrhini (New World Monkeys) and the Catarrhini, which is made up of the Cercopithecoidea (Old World Monkeys) and Hominoidea (Greater and Lesser Apes).
Humans are both apes and monkeys only in the strict sense that they are simians - i.e. when they are considered as part of a broader inclusive group with a single common ancestor.
Box turtles have a hinged shell which closes like a box.
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Here in the US, turtle refers to anything in the Testudines, which is the approach @elkins456 was using. Tortoise refers specifically to a group of entirely terrestrial turtles. Terrapin here refers specifically to a salt-marsh species along the East Coast of the US, although there may be some non-US species where we use the name as well. We also have quite a few turtles that are largely to mostly aquatic, for which we just use the name turtle.
Incidentally, we have a genus of turtles here called Box Turtles. (I think there are some species with the name from elsewhere as well.) They don’t live in boxes, for the most part, but they got the name because they have a hinge on the plastron that allows them to close the head and front leg openings when threatened. (Ooops, should have read further…)
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and I found a turtle in my lake, interesting isn’t, but later few weeks ago I found that was terrapins, now I know the reason why none of turtles matched with my terrapins.
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Blockquote
Waterthrushes are Warblers not Thrushes.
I only learned that, oh, this April.
I am surprised that you have encountered this problem so frequently with high schoolers and new users. I find much more compromising issues, most of the time as people attempt to use the app for the first time, and don’t understand some or most of the basics of how it is supposed to work. Basically, all of the issues covered in this handy-dandy guide:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#multiple
Only on very rare occasions have I encountered the kind of issue you’re referring to in comparison. Luckily, this guide has really streamlined my ability to help new users. A lot of times, these new users have their own project they are uploading to for a class requirement, and you can look at the project and see who needs helps with one of the common mistakes made by new users and can just copy and paste from the above list to help them understand.
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I think I would agree with that. While I learned that dinosaurs were reptiles as a child in the 50s, that doesn’t seem like a great classification anymore. Dinosaurs don’t really match up with how we think of reptiles nowadays. Most Reptiles have upper legs that splay out to the side from their shoulders like crocodiles or lizards. Most Dinosaurs had legs underneath their shoulders, say like a horse. Reptiles do not have feathers, but dinosaurs had feathers.
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as a defense mechanism? Draw in head and legs and slam the door?
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Yes, that’s right!
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Another One: Molds (fungi) and Slime Molds
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