This one for example: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1644789-Calanthe-obcordata
This one too: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/500822-Cleisostoma-simondii
I filtered by place: Hong Kong. But the seasonality graphs stay stuck at loading even without the filter.
Second link has a good phenology graph for me today.
Their books are excellent and I have a soft spot for Aussie poecilometis species as that was my first āfirst photo on iNatā. That book looks great.
Maybe my browser thenā¦ glad it works for others!
What I learned today (and yesterday, and probably again tomorrow): How many perfectly identifiable observations of White Meadowsweet, Spiraea alba, there are in eastern North America. The oldest observations I IDed were six years old. Yes, you need to know how to tell White Meadowsweet from Steeplebush, the non-native spiraeas, and Sorbaria, but if the plantās in flower or fruit, thatās not hard. How do we recruit more amateur botanists to ID the easy plants? I will happily leave the sedges and green algae to the real experts, but that leaves dozens - maybe hundreds? - of easy-to-ID plants in eastern North America.
This was my Unknown identify surprise - someone literally was IDing seeds in fresh human feces. Woof.
Awful surprise!
Flag it as inappropriate and mark as human.
What I learned today?
Catalpas can be aggravating to ID if you know it was introduced but you donāt know from where.
Also annoying - the northern and southern catalpa species ranges overlap
Owl pellets are neither tracks nor scat (have I been fixing owl entries? Yesā¦ā¦) https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000191830-what-are-the-definitions-of-inaturalist-annotations-
That Tracker Manual book I picked up in South Africa for fun is coming in useful. Genets vs African wildcats. Hint for photographers: Take a pic of the entire track even the prints that seem obscured as well as the nice clear footprints.
Todayās challenge - Australian spiny orbweaver spiders. The really obvious ones in my area have no name despite lots of observations. I hope there is some PhD student slaving away on this topic. If its black and white you have to check the location as the two choices look very similar. There are very few photos of males and juveniles so please look for them when you find the flashy females! Lots of ā this is definitely a spikey spider but is it a juvenile or male?ā while going through the photo browser to try to find something similar. And if you know you have a male or a juvenile, please annotate it as such!
We have a trip to Sri Lanka planned for next year. I know very little so I pulled up common endemic species and had a happy time pushing chitals into Sri Lankan spotted deer and SLSD into research grade last night. What a pretty deer!
And today Iāve learned there are two coin spiders in Australia. My local one (Herennia oz) has a dark morph that I wasnāt aware of. To tell the difference between a dark H.oz in the NT and the Papuan one in Queenland (apart from location), you have to check out the undercarriage. This is all females. The males are teeny tiny in comparison and tend to lose their pedipalps when mating. This in turn blocks up the female genitalia presumably preventing the male competition from having a go. The winner gets to live the rest of his life as a eunuch. At least he gets to live!
I learned about the Conehead Termite. Its head looks just like the name implies. The head is dark while the body is lighter color. Itās endemic to the nootropics and they can make massive structures.
What about someone posting their gross toenail fungus? I got told off when I posted a comment saying that it wasnāt something iNaturalist would identify. I was told that someone would identify it, but maybe not me.
Ewwwww. That is gross. Iād label as human personally.
Iām not sure if my dermatology skills from way back would be that useful but Iād probably have a go. If I documented the things Iāve found on/in humansā¦
I knew that Hyla versicolor (gray treefrog) and Hyla chrysoscelis (Copeās gray treefrog) could only be distinguished by call or DNA, but today I learned that H. chrysoscelis are diploid and H. versicolor are tetraploid. H. versicolor have twice as many chromosomes as H. chrysoscelis. Which means that any hybrids would be triploid (sterile).
While reading the Wikipedia page to make sure I had straight which one was diploid and which one was tetraploid I found some interesting info about inter-species aggression between males: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_treefrog#Inter-species_interactions
I also found a link to this map of Texas showing which species were found in which counties (based on audio recordings) in a comment of an observation
