I have communicated with people who ID unknowns in my region that I appreciate unknowns being marked as flowering plant (or plant if not flowering, or they don’t know). I have had some problems with people getting dicot vs monocot wrong and not realizing when I add a more specific ID that I am disagreeing with them not just refining, so I would prefer just flowering plant. I only occasionally see what seems to me to be an obs for an insect IDed as a plant. If I’m not sure, I will usually look at what other obs that person has for the day to see if they have a duplicate (so ID for both insect and plant) or if they were mostly doing obs of insects of plants. I will sometimes ask, but often I’m doing old obs and see that the person has not been on the platform in a year or two. I most often add an ID of Dicot because it’s a woody tree (and not a conifer). I don’t know much about IDing trees.
I am a plant person, but a while ago I decided to change my default query from “Kingdom Plantae” in my area to just “my area” in order to pick up Unknowns, many of which are plants. I’m happy I did that, because I’m learning a lot more about all these other organisms, many of which I do actually know.
However, I can say that naive plant people are going to put unknowns into Insecta, not Ptera-whatever-it-is. Seriously, winged and once-winged? We plant people don’t have a clue what “once-winged” might mean. Is it a reference to evolutionary history where wings were lost in some subtaxon of insects? Hopefully, it doesn’t refer to the hapless of victims of children pulling the wings off a fly. Also, whether something has wings or not is not necessarily obvious to the naive observer. Beetles with hardened wings or wing coverings that aren’t obviously wings at all, caterpillars that eventually will have wings, etc, etc. So “Insecta” it is.
That said, I would want to read about how to classify insects to order now. I want now to learn about “wingless insects” and how they are different from “once-winged” insects. My horizons are expanding. But having come from a naive plant person perspective, I can totally relate to putting unknowns into “Insecta”.
I just copied the table into Prolegs, I hope it stays there (unless corrections are needed)
I’m happy to provide some tips about common insect orders, but I don’t want to go off topic in this thread. Perhaps you tag me while looking at unknowns of insects and I give ID advice?
Thanks, I agree that would be a little too off-topic for this thread, and anyway I expect my journey with this will be gradual over months and years, rather than having someone try to take on the task of educating me.
The main point is that switching to look at Unknowns in my area is expanding my horizons and knowledge of the bigger picture than the silo I’ve been in. I’ve also been observing insects more recently, starting with the pollinators that my plants are attracting. I’m curious what they are, but also I get that the id is just the gateway that opens up knowledge. I also want to know the overall ecological effect they bring to the garden life. What are they eating, are they parasitizing any pest insects, all of it.
Well, I’m not the OP, but it seems to me that a thread titled “new and trying to help with identifications” is an excellent place for discussing identification tips for taxa where one does not yet have much experience but wants to be able to provide better/more useful IDs. :)
I don’t think it would be off topic per se, but since it would be a specific different topic, it would probably be more useful to make a separate thread. That would be much more searchable and easier for users to find tips for specifically IDing insect orders in the future. If the discussion is at the end of a thread with >100 posts, it would likely be pretty buried for other users.
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