Most gazapatonic misidentification?

A year or two ago, there was a spate of French speakers identifying things they didn’t know as “inconnu”, which happens to be the common name of a certain fish. I’ve recently been browsing disagreements, and I’ve found these:

  • A jay (a corvid) was misidentified as scad (a fish) which is called “jay” in Wolof.
  • Someone found a beetle which she thought was a ladybug and typed in “catarina”, which also happens to be a word for a kind of mantis shrimp.

Do you look for disagreements and try to resolve them? Have you seen an ant misidentified as a moose, or anything similar?

(Mods, is it OK to post the URLs of the obs?)

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The never-observed Peruvian millipede genus Inconus is sometimes posted by Francophones for the same reason.

Caterpillars from northeastern Spain are occasionally identified as the rare Ichneumonid wasp genus Eruga, since that means caterpillar in Catalonian.

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I fairly frequently accidently identify Anna’s Hummingbird as genus Anna, and have to edit my ID immediately afterwards

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What does “gazapatonic” mean? I’ve never encountered this word before and it gets zero hits on Google.

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There is a bird (Porzana carolina) whose common name is Sora. I’ve seen it misidentified as Sora, which is a genus of beetles.

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For a long time we had butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) labelled as a specific fish, that had a nickname “Lepidop”, since removed. The auto selection loved to choose this fish when you entered that name as the first result.

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Recently we had an interesting series of ID’s on a simple land plant. (#2 is correct)

1st (me): Honewort, Cryptotaenia (a flowering plant, not even spelled quite the same)

2nd: Hornworts, Anthocerotophyta (a Bryophyte, not a flowering plant)

3rd: Hornwort, Ceratophyllum demersum (a flowering plant)

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From Spanish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gazapatón

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so nothing to do with Gaza - the place - from which we get the word gauze.

We have 850 sp of Erica in the Western Cape, but they used that for a handful of spiders.

You can find plenty more among the 22K Kingdom Disagreements

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A few times, I identified a bee as an orchid. Both have the same scientific name of the genus: Stelis.

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I mixed up those two

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/148397-Telamonia

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1151842-Telamonia

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Has anyone mixed up a North Carolinian plant with its Eurasian prey?

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I recall seeing an observation of a grass originally identified as the fish genus Brama, I don’t recall what the grass was called but it was spelled very similarly to Brama so it’s likely what the identifier was trying to input. If anyone more familiar with plants than I knows of a grass that is spelled similar to Brama, please let me know so I can refind the observation!

Grama? It’s a common name, though.

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Mis-identifying pigs as magpies is weirdly common occurrence.

Also, I think I have sometime mixed up sääkset and sääsket.

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I found in there a dicot misidentified as the flatfish Citharus linguatula, which is called «feuille» in French, which means “leaf”.

The magpie is called “pig” in Breton.

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Very often people misspell the plant genus Artemisia as Artemesia, which happens to be a shrimp genus.

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I, and numerous others, have been caught identifying hoverflies in the genus Melanogaster as fungi of the same name.

The most annoying one for me is how often the uploader picks up Coccinellid names of the form ‘X-spot ladybird’ from my file names, and interprets it as ‘Spot Croaker’, an east coast North American fish… I have identified many of my own ladybird observations as fish in this way… :p

Also, I definitely intend to regularise the word ‘gazapatonic’ :)

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I’ve been known to select Pseudagrion microcephalum (a damselfly) instead of Pseudognaphalium microcephalum (a plant)

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If one is flying along with identifications for Deer in North America and going to ssp. beware of the drop down selection for Columbian Black-tailed Deer (as my meant-to-be choice) and yet Columbian Black-capped Chickadee is ready to sneak in there (like auto-fill) Columbian Black-capped Chickadee Poecile atricapillus ssp. fortuitus - as the ID. It’s happened to me enough (and to a few others). You hear back quick enough about the WT… ?

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