Before you started really learning about living things you might have had a bunch of folk knowledge. Stuff people told you, or things you observed that you thought to be true. But then you might find out it’s not true.
For me my bad “folk fact” was that “black carpenter ants can’t bore into healthy wood, only rotten wood” and this is mostly true for Eastern Camponotus. But things are different out west. Photos on iNaturalist convinced me that modoc can grind into non-rotten wood, not from scratch, but they are just more aggressive about creating hollows in wood than any Camponotus from out east.
I thought I knew what I was talking about. I keep my pet carpenter ants in a wooden nest, if they could carve it they’d get out, but I’ve had the same colony for nearly 5 years.
It’s a good thing I don’t have pet modoc.
Seeing photos of modoc nests convinced me. My friends from out west were not committing “ant slander”
I have learned that many organisms will occur outside the range shown on published distribution maps. When I worked as a forest ranger years ago, I would sometimes give talks to park visitors at one park, Mt Tinbeerwah on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, I would point out a tree that was common at that site (Eucalyptus exersta), and inform my listeners, “This park is the most southern point of this tree’s distribution”. I now see on iNat that there are research grade observations for this tree hundreds pf kilometres south of Tinbeerwah.
attributing any mystery bites to spiders. tons of research including studies done by Lou Coticchio on loxosceles sp. show that typical true spiders dont really bite ppl unless they are somehow trapped against the skin and even then plenty of them still wont bite or will dry bite (no envenomation). like there’s no reason for a spider to go out of its way to bite someone since their venom is spensive to produce and they know they cant eat us. even if someone has a “bite” or lesion in their skin, it’s impossible to narrow down from what creature (if it was even from a creature) it originated.
the myth is so persistent that i’ve even seen it in medical discussions (you can find “bite identification guides” on various medical sites) despite the information being completely unverifiable from an entomological standpoint
i used to attribute any random cut as a spider bite without any further thought and i know millions of ppl do the same thing because it’s just part of the collective psyche