What is an interesting rabbit-hole you’ve gone down when identifying? What did you learn from it?
Today I found an observation of a mushroom known as A. muscaria flavivolvata. Usually, they’re iconically red. This one was a bit pale, sad, and brown - normal when these mushrooms begin to wither away from old age. Someone suggested Amanita muscaria variety chrysoblema… what? I had never heard of this organism before, and researching it only gave me more questions.
I was redirected to a completely different species, A. chrysoblema, which some consider to still be a variety of A. muscaria (hence *A. muscaria var. chrysoblema), a point that is still highly contested among mycologists/taxonomists. Then, in other literature, I found A. muscaria var. alba which is described nearly identically to this alleged A. chrysoblema. Apparently, these are all the same mushroom! The first was named in 1880 (A. muscaria var. alba by Peck), again in 1918 (A. chrysoblema by Kauffman), and still, there is no agreement as to which is THE one name. They have all been being used to describe the same thing for decades!
The ladybug Adalia frigida has been split from A. bipunctata. A. frigida is red with two rows of black spots and is mainly found in Scandinavia and Russia. However, beetles matching that description are also reported throughout North America still under the name Adalia bipunctata. The problem is whether these beetles should be regarded as A. frigida instead. The genetic study that split the two species only used material from the former USSR leaving the beetles in Canada and the United States unresolved.
I’ll have to do some research on their status. It’s important to note that if these beetles do belong to frigida instead of bipunctata, potentially dozens of observations will have to be manually re-identified. I’m not too excited about that!
One of the toughest parts is actually gathering identification information. If I didn’t know any better, it would seem some taxonomists/institutions want to keep the discovery and instructions on how to identify new species a secret. Actually ridiculous, and very anti public. How is anybody going to learn about or appreciate a species when they can’t even ID it?
Not just talking about new stuff, but also like species described 100 - 200 years ago. I truly believe there must be some species descriptions of Chironomid that are just not on the entire internet at all. Like some descriptions trapped in a 100 year book in the basement of a library 1000 miles away.
I definitely agree that these older works should be more accessible. There are plenty of species that have no recent studies, so older material is really all we have to go on. I ID ladybugs and practically all modern taxonomy for North American species is in one way or another, based on Gordon’s 1985 work. Luckily, the publication has been fully digitised, but if it weren’t, getting into identifying this group would have been a lot more difficult.
I also just enjoy viewing how our understanding of different species has changed through the decades. It’s usually a fun rabbithole to go through and it’s all made possible through preserving older works.
For Chironominae, a large subfamily of Chironomid, the most comprehensive and latest work is 1945. For Tanypodinae it is 1971. Mind you this is just for North America. The other subfamilies have no comprehensive piece of work in North America at least.
Run into this a lot with leech identification, and has made me flat out drop it as I don’t have the resources to get into their ID if everything is paywalled.
Do you have access to a university library (or contact with someone who does)? I’ve found that their databases/subscriptions are often a good way to get paywalled articles.
In many ways the accessibility of specialized scientific articles has improved tremendously compared to, say, 10-15 years ago, because so much more of it is available digitally than ever before, and increasingly it is being published in open access form. This includes both new literature and older literature that has been digitized and collected by projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t more that needs to happen, but there was a time not so long ago when just about everything was hidden away in the archives of some specialized library or another.
For me, this phenomenon often comes from identifying something interesting that has no Wikipedia page. I end up looking for enough information on it to create said Wikipedia page. This happened with Scleroderma bermudense and more recently with Alessioporus rubriflavus.
That pops up occasionally for me. I had one where Bombus sandersoni, that is commonly described as having a thin yellow band on T5, but there is a large area in Canada where that species shows yellow on T4-6. So it had me wondering about the possibility of these being a color variation of Bombus frigidus. Two of us were looking through pictures to compare, and he pulled out specimens. In the end we concluded that this is the regional variation for sandersoni.
Another time, I was asked to review some observations for a project in Canada, and found an un-ID’d observation for Bombus ashtoni (very rare). On finding that, three of us were scouring unidentified observations across those provinces and looking at similar species. In the end, we found over a hundred ashtoni, and even a small pile of suckleyi (more rare).
I agree with a lot of people here. I find it really annoying that there’s countless insects and stuff that don’t even have a Wikipedia article. Like I’ve seen so many kinds of ants in the Philippines, but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to ID them, but in theory there should be. Like if I brought a microscope and took extreme closeup photos, or DNA tested them or something, surely there has to be something there to identify them with? But even if I did collect that kind of data, I just can’t really find the resources to actually tell me what to do with that information. So I don’t really know how to find that rabbit-hole to begin with. And I feel like ants don’t really travel that far, so wouldn’t it be somewhat easy to determine the species by range? Sometimes I wonder how similar species even tell each other apart if they overlap in range so much.
In terms of things I have identified successfully, usually it just takes a couple Google searches, at least for most tetrapods. Sometimes the ID isn’t talked about enough, and I end up finding some obscure blog post. Orchard vs Hooded Oriole is an annoying one because the range doesn’t really overlap enough for people to talk about it often, but vagrants occur by me enough for that ID to be reasonably needed. Other times, I get a subpar photo, so I can’t use the normal, easy ID features. But I really want to ID the animal still, so I have to dig for obscure stuff. So it takes a little more digging than usually necessary. Otherwise, this is just one of the reasons I use iNaturalist, to find someone who already knows that information can identify stuff for me.