Another silly part about these identical genera names is that the About tab sometimes pulls the wrong Wikipedia article, and once when I tried to flag such a problem, I was told there’s no way to fix it.
I don’t identify those to subspecies, but if I see one identified to genus, figure out that it’s a mule deer, and type “bura”, one of the top choices is the other species, the white-tailed deer, which lives here. Once I was on the way to Charlotte and had just left the gas station in Rutherford County when a deer ran out of the woods and, despite me braking, hit my pickup, and I had to get out the other side. It turns out that “bura” is both part of “venado bura”, the mule deer, and the name of the white-tailed deer in Guaymí, aka Ngäbere [ŋɔˈbeɾe], a language of Panama. Is that where “venado bura” comes from?
I’ve seen more than one case of domestic dogs labelled as domestic cats and vice versa, I’m not sure why, but maybe people type in “Domestic” and click the first thing available.
further “investigations” - ‘venado bura’
https://tureng.com/en/spanish-english/bura
and then Desert Mule Deer are known in Mexico as Ciervo Bura Del Desierto.
but then this ‘rabbit hole’ of meanings: https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bura - https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bura
Plantea vs Plantae requires cleaning a few times a year
The genus Dic instead of Dicots!
It’s a hooded shrimp apparently
Ins for Insecta. Sometimes feels as if taxonomists deliberately choose to trip us up :~))
I’ve seen countless “bushes” identified as the Bushtit – a bird endemic the the North American West Coast.
I have seen earthworms misidentifed as a genus of thistles.
Once, I even came across something identified as Genus Unkown, which is not even a searchable taxon but apprently used to be.
What I havent seen, but am kinda surprised, is anything misidentified as Cosa. Spanish-speaking observers often put “cosa” as a placeholder for unknowns, beause it means “something.”
im a native spanish speaker and i’d never heard of this word…you learn something new every day i suppose!
I’m not a curator, but as far as I know, you did the right thing by flagging it, and it should be easy to fix? For example:
I think in the particular case I found, the “correct” genus didn’t have a Wikipedia article and that’s why it couldn’t be fixed. Something like that. It was a while ago.
Amy, you probably know about this, but I’ll share this thread because it might add value for newer forum users who might not know about it:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/help-the-world-out-and-create-this-page-on-wikipedia/
I have usually had a kinder response from curators - they make a Wiki stub, then someone can flesh it out later. Better than linking to the wrong. We have a pea genus https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/139298-Cyclopia which originally had a nasty medical page from Wiki for a cyclops birth defect.
In those cases the wiki can still be de-linked, so instead of showing the wikipage it just shows the default stub, like “X is a species of plant with y observations”
I regularly check the plant genus Anemone for stray sea anemones. And a lot of plant pathogens get their IDs applied incorrectly - it’s easy to click “Oxalis Rust” when you mean to click “Oxalis”.
I searched for Plantea, and all that appeared was plants (including plantains in the genus Plantago), so I had to do a full search and scroll down a few screenfuls to find out that Plantea is a noctuid moth. Is this a bug?
Many times the plant genus Grevillea ends up IDed as a beetle. There is apparently a beetle genus Grevillia:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1075424-Grevillia
I say “apparently” as there are no observations of that genus anywhere in the world. But many people trying to ID their plant mis-spell it with an “i” and end up with the beetle.
I once identified a large water bird as a Canada Gooseberry and a seagull as an Olympic Grasshopper. My “Echidna Moray” was a spiky primitive mammal. Who knew that Salix can be a tunicate (sea animal) as well as the familiar willows.
Or the quenk, which is Pecari tajacu here but Dicotyles tajacu on Wikipedia. It shows up whenever I identify something as a dicot. (The c is pronounced /s/, as if it were ç. See the related genus Tayassu, from the same Tupi word.)
There are lots of earlier posts around homonyms.
Open feature request from 2019
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/homonym-disambiguation/40664
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxons-with-same-names-show-closest-on-top/51730/6
And @jeanphilippeb has some journal posts around Not-quite-homonyms Use scientific names, they say - none of the confusion you get with common names 