How many different orders of vertebrates have you personally seen in your life? Doesn’t have to be posted on iNaturalist, I’m just curious.
I like making completely unnecessary calculations and spreadsheets for fun. I have recently started making my own personal life list of vertebrates that I’ve seen. I know iNat has a life list function but a lot of the species I’ve seen are not on iNat because I don’t have any photos of them. And I like being able to play around with the data and make pie charts and such from it. Most birders have a life list of birds they’ve seen, this is like that but expanded to all vertebrates. Obviously you could pick any level of taxonomy to explore but orders seems like a good place to start.
By my calculations, I’ve seen 236 species of vertebrates in my life which are divided into 37 orders:
Birds: 19 orders, 165 species
Amphibians: 2 orders, 13 species
Reptiles: 3 orders, 22 species
Ray-finned fish: 6 orders, 8 species (I’m sure I’ve seen more but I didn’t know what species they were)
Mammals: 7 orders, 28 species
I am very curious to know how these numbers compare to other amateur naturalists, especially if you’ve only traveled within one country (for me, USA) and are under the age of 30.
I still find it rather crazy that if you want to see/photo a wild member of Order Artiodactyla in the US you can go find a deer OR head to the ocean and do some whale watching. That taxonomy just doesn’t feel right.
I have a terrible memory, so there’s no way I could estimate this reliably from memory. I’ll just have to consider my iNaturalist life list good enough, especially if we’re sticking to wild animals (I’ve not made a habit of documenting what I’ve seen in captivity).
According to iNaturalist, I’ve seen:
Amphibians: 2 orders, 8 species
Birds: 15 orders, 116 species
Mammals: 6 orders, 34 species
Ray-Finned Fish: 7 orders, 24 species
Reptiles: 2 orders, 8 species
I’ve also seen 3 species of tunicates in 2 orders, who are there with us in the phylum Chordata. For a fun contrast, I’ll toss in two of my other favourite phyla:
I also think it is worth pointing out that “Order” like most other Linnean ranks, has no biological definition beyond “a group of related Families” and therefore Orders of reptiles for example, are in no way comparable to orders of birds, and neither is comparable to mammals, etc… There are four extant Orders of reptiles (excluding the birds) and 41 Orders of birds, but all the birds are one small branch of the dinosaurs, which are, looking at the phylogeny, roughly another Order of reptiles. Orders are therefore fun to count, and interesting from a history-of-science perspective, and sometimes useful in remembering who is related to whom, but don’t have much meaning beyond that.
I don’t really focus on vertebrates and only observe them basically when they cross my path, so I’m not able to match all these impressive life lists :D
I have observed 38 orders of vertebrates according to the iNat dynamic life list. My bird list on iNat is less than 1/5 of my official life list and my mammal observations are probably 1/4 of my life list.
I picked orders because it seemed like a good place to start when trying to understand how diverse the natural world is. Class is too broad: pretty much everyone already understands which animals are birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, or amphibians. (And for me, family was too specific to be a good starting point, since there are so many more families than orders.) But most of us have only a very rough understanding of different orders. For example, most people know that there are different kinds of mammals: some are marsupials, some are rodents, some are carnivores and some are herbivores. But when you look into different orders, you realize that rabbits/hares are in their own order, Lagomorpha, rather than being in Rodentia with rodents as many people think.
And there’s a lot to learn from the orders of birds too: I didn’t realize until I made this list that loons are in their own order separate from ducks and geese, and that kingfishers are also in their own order as well, whereas hummingbirds, whippoorwills, and chimney swifts (birds that I thought were very different from each other) are all in the same order Caprimulgiformes.
So I think learning about different orders can be a start to learning about taxonomy in general.
But then we found out they do have feet! (I realize this is not the real story. But I still think it’s hilarious.)
Assuming I did the math correctly, I am at 43 orders of vertebrates. 24 of those are birds. I was surprised how many other types I have picked up along the way.
I am rather a bit older than you, but I haven’t been keeping track for that long. A couple of trips helped get the number of bird orders up, but generally I don’t travel much as a birder so my life list is not that high. (Those trips were not birding trips, the birds were incidental.)
Order Gymnophiona (caecilians) used to be Apoda given their footless (and footloose?) characteristic. That’s an amphibian order that is difficult for most of us to add to our life list.
20 Bird Orders, 6 Mammal, 2 Reptile, 1 Amphibian, not sure to what to count on my list for fish, since some are more ambiguous, only a few I am really confident in. Some I can probably figure an order, but don’t have any definitive species.
Class Actinopterygi: 23 orders, 53 species
Class Aves: 14 orders, 68 species
Class Mamalia: 8 orders, 35 species
Class Reptilia: 3 orders, 19 species
Class Amphibia: 2 orders, 9 species
Class Elasmobranchii: 1 order, 1 species
The distribution of number of species per order is interesting, there are definitely some reasons behind it, partly my own behavior and partly taxonomic
(I realize this is not the real story. But I still think it’s hilarious.)