Different Species With The Same English Name

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Is there a way to flag two species that are given identical English names on iNat for review and possible change? Is this even encouraged? I am looking in particular at two species of Iris… Iris sanguinea and Iris ensata, both of which are called Japanese Iris. A quick look at Wikipedia shows a number of alternative names for each.

I try to follow the iNat naming conventions whenever possible in my own work, but in a case like this it can get a bit confusing.

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Many organisms do validly have the same most-frequently-used common name as each other, but to raise the issue for discussion, go to the taxon page for one of them, click Curation, then Flag for curation.

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Thanks!

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It’s not only English that has this problem. Some examples from Spanish:

  • Junco is a rush (in the family Juncaceae), but there’s also a bird called junco, in the genus Junco, so called because of its association with rushes
  • “Arañas patonas”, like English “daddy longlegs”, refers both to Opiliones and to Pholcidae. As it contains “arañas”, I think it should not refer to Opiliones, which aren’t really arañas, but that’s what people say.
  • Spanish plátano is both English sycamore (i.e. plane tree, not to be confused with sycomore, which is a fig) and plantain (cooking banana), and also an eating banana in some dialects. English plantain is both plátano and llantén (Plantago).

I’ve also had a cross-linguistic confusion between two species of deer. The mule deer is venado bura in Spanish (I don’t know what “bura” means). If I type “bura”, though, I get the white-tailed deer. I looked it up and found that it’s Guaymí, i.e. Ngäbere, a Panamanian indigenous language. The white-tail extends through Panama into Colombia, where I saw one while my pickup was being repaired for having been hit by a white-tailed deer in North Carolina.