Is the problem that it is only identified to kingdom?
Yes. As the ID narrow, the available phenology fields increase
If it has flowers, ID as Flowering Plant then options to mark as flowering/budding/fruiting with appear.
Thanks all. You can tell that I don’t annotate often by the fact that I never ran into this issue before.
I’m still discovering features
These sorts of observations are welcome to go in this project. They can be there along with some of the other types of observations that need help to go to their best place at iNat. Ultimately someone will come by in “housekeeping” mode later and help you out!
I think you have to be “joined” for the project to let you add observations to it though. If you’re not up for that, just @ me or whatever.
The various types of “obs with probs” are features in our iNat landscape. ;)
I like this.
be the pro who helps obs with probs
Even our grandest of parades needs those guys at the end.
(FWIW I picture the “Improbable” lady in that clip as one of the “last seen 125 years ago” obs that gets into the iNat blog.)
How much do you know about Hispaniolan anoles?
Quite a bit, though I’ve been holding off for a bit since it’s quite a herpetologically-diverse island. I can start after I finish identifying the Cayman Islands.
As part of a broad mushroom cleanup I’ve been doing, I’ve run into a lot of branch disagreements in Agaricomycotina, which is the bin that “jelly fungi” go to when people can’t decide. There a lot of “typical” mushrooms stuck in there due to a disagree, that ideally could be moved out of the way of the jellies.
If anyone can recognize the differences at a glance and wants to help weight those some Friday, the earlier pages in this view (by date updated) are likely to contain the items that need more weight to get to Agaricomycetes. Look for obs with 3 or more id’s, and if you see me commenting “still in here?”, that’s what’s going on. Thanks for any help!
I can fix some of the ones with a disagreement between Order Auriculariales and Order Tremellales where I’m familiar with the species.
Looks like I have a project later XD
BTW if anyone is interested in getting in the weeds a bit on Auricularia, this paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8625027/) is recent (2021) and does a good job breaking down the ranges and differences between different species / groups.
Most of the ones that are getting confused with other jelly fungus species in the US are probably A. americana, A. angiospermarum, or A. fuscosuccinea (the last one is a southern US species)
EDIT: Honestly there’s a ton of wood ear fungus across the eastern US that are probably wildly IDed, that paper lists A. fuscosuccinea as a southeastern species but INat has research grade observations as far north as like… northern Indiana or New England. That doesn’t seem correct, though I wish I knew someone who was a little better at these guys to confirm my suspicions
@NoGenAI I know you know a bit about jelly fungi, any insight on Auricularia ranges?
EDIT 2: If you want to help knock any of these out without having to get too granular, anything that’s a cap & stem mushroom with gills or pores is pretty safe to put in Agaricomycetes. Also shelf fungi.
Also if you can’t tell if its Exidia or Auricularia, Auriculariaceae is an okay guess
EDIT 3: Since I forgot to mention - AFAIK A. americana is the only species of Auricularia in the US that grows on conifer wood. So if its on confier in the US, its safe to mark to species. A. angiospermarum and A. fuscosuccinea both grown on angiosperms, and are visually… pretty close, all three are visually really close, so the latter two probably come down to a range issue, or honestly, microscopy unfortunately
EDIT 4: Also TBH don’t stress too much if some of these are unidentifiable - a lot are never going to get past Agaricomycetes
EDIT 5: Slightly older paper but it talks specifically about differentiating A. fuscosuccinea and A. angiospermarum (referred to, in this case, as A. americana ‘deciduous’) https://openjournals.wsu.edu/index.php/pnwfungi/article/view/1126 - macroscopically it seems like the biggest difference between the two is A. fuscosuccinea has more reddish-brown hues, though it does also have a white morph apparently - here’s an example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28084802
EDIT 6 I swear I’m stopping after this: There’s also A. cornea which ALSO is present in the US and has a densely hairy upper surface and variable morphology. So technically its more a look alike for A. nigricans which shares the hairy upper surface but from pictures it can honestly be hard to tell density of mushroom fuzz unless its a really sharp pictures.
Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, I’m just combing through papers ATM
Okay, so if I’ve photo’ed the top, gills, and stalk (including base) of a mushroom, and it still isn’t identifiable to species. What is the likelihood that taking a spore print will make a difference?
Spore print could help, a little, maybe. I suppose there’s probably species where color can help weed out look a alikes.
Chemical tests might be more useful than spore prints, TBH. Ammonia/KoH/Iron Salts are the most common ones, the color change can be really helpful in differentiating different species, though I’m most familiar with using them for bolete ID. If you look, places like Mushroom Expert, Bolete Filter, and some books will have details about what color changes you can expect, though not every mushroom will have this (for example, one of my obs https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/173523733)
Honestly though, microscopy I think is better. I really want to pick up a microscope so I can start getting shots of spores and other microscopic features, because that’s really the big ticket for narrowing down some of them.
But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. There’s extremely well known mycologists on inat who can’t get all their stuff to research grade.
EDIT: I bet this is why mushroom observer has more of a confidence vote/percentage system versus a straight yes-or-no like inat does. it allows for someone to go 'I think its PROBABLY this thing but I’m not 100%)
Oh I found a messy one that’s going to need more than the pre-maverick project to get it solved
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/3631517 if anyone feels like adding their input (quick ID tip: Phallus species have a distinct skirt area that is slimy, Mutinus lack this distinct area.)
Our August for Africa IDathon
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/mission-impossible-identify-plantae-in-africa/43528
Lots of lD links to play with in that first post.