I have seen Manduca sexta (Carolina Sphinx) be missidetified as Manduca quinquemaculatus (Five-Spotted Hawk Moth) quite a bit both as larvae and adults. Sometimes, I see the adult Hyles livornica (Striped Hawkmoth) be missidentified as Hyles lineata (White-lined Sphinx) in the US and H. livornica does not occur in the US.
When I am ID’ing at rank order lepidoptera, I run into a lot of sawfly larvae. I also find quite a bit of hover fly larvae and leaf beetle larvae. The less common missidentifications are adult dobsonflies, adult caddisflies and adult planthoppers.
Ah, yes. Sawfly larvae. I gave up trying to figure out whether a caterpillar is a lepidopteran or a sawfly. I hope the identifiers of lepidoptera get a little jolt of superiority when correcting the ones that are really sawflies.
They’re very easy to separate, true caterpillars have up to 5 pairs of prolegs, sawfly larvae can have none or 6+, caterpillars have head capsule with impression going through it, sawfly heads are smooth and rounded on top, their bodies are very wrinkly, much more than caterpillar body, then they have different eyes and legs, most sawfly larvae are hairless and those that have hair are quite specific, but nowhere close to what hairy caterpillars get.
For me it’s Doodia aspera identified as D. australis and Cyathea general mix-ups.
But especially Cheilanthes sieberi identified as C. australis. these can be hard, but having the two sp. in the back yard, over the years I’ve spotted subtleties that really aid ID, but are hard to put into a short explanation.
Perhaps you can put a link on identiFriday thread.
We need a place for second tier identifiers like me - to find an URL we can tackle.
Freeing up taxon specialist to focus where their skills are truly needed.
The grunt work can be farmed out to people who are competent and willing to help.
My level is picking fungi, or lichen, out of Unknowns. Then sit back and watch others battle out the details.
Best I can do right now, there’re also miners, borers, things like Eriocampa and Caliroa from sawflies, and all the diversity of caterpillars, but for most observations that is enough.
Sometimes I wonder if we need a project for us hard-core identifiers. A place where we can all be administrators and thus all contribute journal posts. Where we can celebrate victories and whine discreetly about the unending workload. We could add observations that are difficult to ID and consolidate our knowledge about hard-to-ID species. There could be monthly goals (straighten out Tiarella or Usnea, clean up the 2022 CNC observations, etc.). And so on.
Or is it just me who feels a little isolated in my labors?
This is the one that is intriguing me as the year rolls over
In Libya. Marine life (no - a seasonal pool). Fungi - not. We have reached cautious consensus at dicot … enquiring minds across the globe …
Octopus Medusa’s head with Fibonacci snakes. Or is it a computer generated image?? I still lean to a dead daisy.
For what it’s worth, my quick estimate from looking at the first 100 observations is that the misidentification rate is 14%, the majority of these being Chamaesaracha coniodes.
Here is one that I, myself typically IDed wrong, until I figured out the difference: Little Ironweed Cyanthillium cinereum as Lilac Tasselflower Emilia sonchifolia. In the Dominican Republic, I have often seen mixed stands of these two species, and I remembered wondering why only some indidividuals had the “sonchus-like” leaves.
The most common mis-ID last year was sordida in central Texas where it is actually edwardsiana 90% of the time