Join the Pre-Maverick project ?
Then you can work thru the obs where 2 people agree - but you don’t. Withdraw, or agree with them, to reach consensus. Unless you are a Proud Maverick (I AM right because …)
You can also filter Pre-Mavericks by taxon or location (or both) without joining - to help clear the Needs ID backlog.
We have retrieved half a million obs there.
Mavericks are where consensus has already been reached, with or without you (your ID makes no difference either way, but still adds weight where you are a taxon specialist)
I con’t feel like a maverick. I just want to be able to react quickly when I e.g. misidentify a member of Onograceae as Brassicaceae because I did forget to count the stamens (and the overall shape of the flower was very cabbage-like (i.e. a bit rectangular rather then exactly quadratic, and with that tubular bit at the root of the petals)). It would be a nightmare if I banished something to a super-coarse group like plantae just because that’s the MRCA of the real species and my error.
Btw., I learned just a few days ago that one can eat the unripe siliques (I just had to look for that word) of radish etc., so plants that ran to seed aren’t a total loss.
I agree, lately I might key something out and still need to be at pains to note the tentative nature. This often turns into fascinating discussions about ID.
Hubby and I were talking about Fungi ID and honestly, IMHO its fine that a lot of IDs aren’t expert because the amount of actual mushroom experts is so small compared to the overall population, and even then like… are they an expert on the particular mushroom that you’re posting?
People don’t expect all insect people to know all insects right? One person might be a Lepidoptera expert, another might be a Hymenoptera expert, and the third might Odonata expert - and no is tagging the butterfly guy to ID dragonflies.
But it almost feels like there’s not enough mycologists, amateur or professional, to even be able to have that distinction. There’s maybe six different people tops in my area on iNat that I see going through and iding stuff on the regular, a couple of them are also in the local mycology facebook group, and one is literally a published author on the subject who runs workshops in the area.
Even on said mycology facebook page (that has a fairly active community,) the amount of people actually giving IDs is far outstripped by people posting vague pictures of half-rotted mushrooms and asking if they’re edible without having ANY idea of what they’re looking at.
And don’t even get me started on trying to get more people to migrate from there over to iNat, a lot of people that are in to mushrooms are strictly in to the foraging aspect and basically only have scientific curiosity to the point where they want to know if it will taste good or if it will kill them. Which, is fine, not everyone is going to get weirdly excited about tiny mushrooms with no culinary value, but it does make it difficult to find resources on anything that isn’t edible, closely related to edibles, or wildly poisonous.
(Like I literally saw a post earlier today of a random Amanita and the first thing the person asked was if they could eat it. Like… my guys, if you have to ask, you aren’t experienced enough to try foraging that genus of mushroom)
So yeah. Throw on that tentative ID, at least its something XD
Pink rings on lichen.
Will add my own obs next time I see it.
I had thought it was man-made vandalism with paint. Neon pink in neat circles.
I wonder if that ID will ever move? Can ever move?
Lichens are an entirely different expertise than more charismatic (see, mushrooms) fungi and I can’t even begin to approach them. So much microscopy is needed to ID them - let alone one that might have an infection XD
And of course, one of the first things you’d learn if you got involved in a mycological society is that no half-rotted mushroom is edible. I once got really sick off a positively identified morel because it was past its prime. But when I later had morels at the proper stage – yummy, and no problems.
Your post gave me food for thought (heh). It sounds from your description like “mushroomy-looking things” would be an area of developing expertise for a good segment of any incoming fungi-identifiers. Coincidentally I’ve recently started nudging a few of those things out of Kingdom to Class.
So, now I’m motivated beyond my original intentions*, for the same fun as kicking butterflies from the Lepidoptera pile because experts are happy to look at that Superfamily. But my fun means your notification spam folks, if you’ve been id’ing anything lazily as Fungi. My apologies for that. Please mute me or whatever the trick is when you get bugged.
We have a new champion: somebody planted bell pepper seeds (or maybe precultivated seedlings) in his garden and added the label that had the barcode EAN on it for which google gave me the vendor and product type (and an error message because the vendor’s website seems to have problems) ;-)
And then there are two people in Taiwan with over 60k observations each, many of them “unknown”, Idk why. These people otherwise know what they do, they ID’d also a lot of their obervations. One even himself added the species to a plant for which I gave the genus after one hour.
Some people do this, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s been discussed on the forum before but I can’t find the thread at the moment. I think a poeple have said they just like getting their observations up quickly and then working through the IDs.
Let’s keep things constructive - it’s easy to start complaining or speculating about users’ behavior, but it doesn’t lead to knowledge or helpful insights. If you’re wondering why someone did something, you can ask them directly or you can start a topic here and ask if anyone here chooses to do X behavior and why they do it.
True story, a few months ago I was in a garden center and saw a plant with a printed label that said
“Garden Onion - Lactuca sativa”
You can’t always trust those labels.