Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying Christmas. I thought it would be fun to see how many taxa have Christmas in either their common name or scientific name. When I search Christmas on iNaturalist under “Taxa”, there was ten pages worth of material! Interestingly, there are apparently two Christmas Berries if one looks at the suggestions list before pressing enter…
If I had to pick a favorite “Christmas Taxa”, I kind of like the Christmas Spider (Austracantha minax ssp. lugubris) https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/196693-Austracantha-minax-lugubris. It looks like a walking piece of coal.
Original observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13657204 by @flecksy.