"Plant Blindness" and iNaturalist

I am also very guilty. Of my 125 observations (I’m primarily an IDer) I only have one animal, a Pseudoscorpion I found on a plant.

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The “correct” approach would be to duplicate the observation and specify which one you mean (to the best of your ability). IDers are supposed to adhere to the observer’s wish (when stated) in terms of what to ID in a photo.

I sometimes also link the two observations to each other via the description (don’t know if there’s a better way).

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I once got quite a long soliloquy from a soil scientist along the lines of “I can’t understand why botanists make little to no effort to ID soil type when it’s a huge factor in what plants grow where!” Soil blindness any one? Ha!

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Black gumbo will suck your boots off when wet and have cracks that descend to hades when dry, but it does grow some good vegetables. Carrots (and other roots maybe) do horrible though. Might be a foot long and skinnier than your pinkie. :)

It is funny sometimes when someone overlooks a huge reptile in the center to id a plant that is to the side, or the reverse. People seem to have their priorities, often plant is lower than animal, but not always.

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Hmm. Many of the botanists I know are all about both soils and geology when considering plants, and in my little niche of tree measurement we sometimes get pretty heavy on correlating maxima of different species/stand types with bedrock, soil, slope, aspect and elevation. Many preliminary conditions reports I’ve read (and all the ones I’ve made) include a soil map and consider its correlation to mapped plant communities.

Maybe your friend got that impression from the classic sort of botanists I’ve heard of who regarded plant ecology as a separate and somehow more vulgar discipline? I have heard of these “purist” botanists, but never met one, and getting into the field at this moment in time my impression has been that most feel you can’t do good botany without understanding plant ecology, and see soil and geology as crucial to understanding what they’re looking at.

Sort of an extreme example, the podcast “crime pays but botany doesn’t” (fun but, be warned, quite irreverent) spends as much time ranting about geology as about plants.

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Thank you for this recommendation!

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Yes, very well done, and by an iNatter, no less! (but not going to “out” them, since they have chosen to remain anonymous so far here). Has a channel by the same name on YouTube also. And yes, definitely brace for salty language – it’s part of the shtick.

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Well, his name is found on a video at YouTube. So much for not “outing” him. :)

Yep, guess so.

Actually, for me botany paid handsomely. I call Galium pedemontanum my “million dollar plant” because finding it “new to Arkansas” while taking plant taxonomy and majoring in botany resulted in my later getting a master’s in botany and a career that has brought me more than $1,000,000. As for the “plant blindness” I suffer from that all the time. For example, I used to think Carex and tended to ignore everything else. Lately, it has been more dragonfly centered. It would be interesting to do a study of biologist paid to survey for something specific and see how often they totally ignore rare species. US Forest Service botanists talked of finding rare plants when they had to squat in the woods for other unnamed purposes. My point is simple. When looking for rare species, it is very easy to concentrate on one thing (Carex or dragonflies) and totally ignore another (the rare species I’m supposed to be keeping my eyes open for).

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some of my best plant and insect observations are in thanks to such unnamed though necessary purposes. Joking aside, being low to the ground will open your eyes to all sorts of things you’re missing! Just try to miss your feet.

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Belly flowers! Especially when I’m in the deserts in SoCal in the spring. I’ll bend down to photo the one flower I can see from about 5’ and see another so kneel, and see another, so lie down, and so it goes! Half an hour later, as my hiking companion rolls their eyes, I finally get up, make it ten feet along the wash, and start all over again.

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There are some plant taxa where the primary taxon image has an obvious insect or spider on the flower, which I assume the botanists just tune out, but are really distracting for me. Examples:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/48943-Datura (spider)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/55620-Solanum-dulcamara (ant)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/49325-Fouquieria-splendens (hummingbird!)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/53445-Rubus-ursinus (bee)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/67820-Erigeron-philadelphicus (another bee)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/56002-Dipsacus-fullonum (yet another bee)

There are probably a lot more examples in the secondary taxon images, which aren’t as easy to scan for examples.

Edit, because some of these will probably get changed, here are links to the original images:
Datura with spider
Solanum dulcamara with ant
Fouquieria splendens with hummingbird
Rubus ursinus with bee
Erigeron philadelphicus with bee
Dipsacus fullonum with bee

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Maybe this is good news? Maybe the botanists setting these photos were not worried about showing the species in complete isolation, but instead with typical interactions in Nature? Am I being too optimistic? :wink:

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It is somewhat amusing to think of the thread topic in terms of “insect blindness” :)

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I’m not a botanist but have photo’d plants that I was hoping to get an ID for and which had insects on them. Didn’t notice the insects until I looked at the plant photos. The insects can be sort of a “bycatch” when photo’ing plants.

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I think now we leave them with research grade at genus level as we do with Polygonum, for example.

I was replying to Susan’s comment about deciding how to treat species, not for ID, but at a species definition. Dandelions are troubling because they are “microspecies” – distinct entities, but not enough to be defined as normal species. But they are distinct – ecologically, just not greatly enough for the authors to settle. So do we “ignore” these microspecies? Or believe in them? If we ignore them, the species can be IDed on iNat, else as you say, only at genus.

If they’re not distinct enough now we better say they’re all one species, but in the future someone will splitthem as they will be diverse enough both ecoloically and genetically. If someone takes samples and says there’re different and someone get them different names those should be on iNat, but lower then species level and it shouldn’t prevent getting other observations under T. officinale, as they’re not full species (until no full new species is discovered without macro differences).
For the website though it’s just easier to stay with what databases say.

Hey, just a friendly reminder, everyone:

Please keep the conversation specific to the topic of plant blindness. Taxonomy conversations are best left separate.

Thanks!

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