There are many perfectly identifiable spiders there which are casual because of missing dates of observation. That is a shame, because there are some interesting ones which have sat unidentified for a long time.
One trend I have noticed is that some people seem to think that if a spider is in a house, or in a garden, then it is not “wild”. I’ve found quite a few Casual spiders that the observer had marked as “not wild”, which have then sadly never been identified. Hopefully now I’ve voted them wild, some may be identified.
part of that identify gap between Unknowns and taxon specialists. Which I can’t face tackling, even if I limit it to Cape Peninsula. There is a lot of work to do hidden in ‘it has some sort of ID so it’s done’
That is reassuring. I rarely feel sure enough to ID mallards, because i don’t know hybrids well, and wondered if I was just chicken. Guess not! Thanks!
Even with what I said, most Mallards identified accurately. I would recommend first learning what a Mallard specifically looks like and use caution when a duck drifts far from that general appearance. This guide from the Cornell Lab will help with the basics. The ID tap is especially useful in this area.
Spilanthes (aster) and Phyla (verbenac). I can understand people might be confused from afar (both are small, appresed weeds of wet areas), but from up close the leaves (entire vs deeply toothed) and the “flowers” (with large rays in Phyla vs. no rays in Spilanthes) are hard to mistake for. I can’t count how many Spilanthes leiocarpa I’ve had to correct in the last year, at least here in Peru, as they were taken for Phylas.
Also Heliotropiums - angiospermum, indicum and rufipilum - the commonest species in the Neotropics, which the CV sometimes has a hard time telling apart.
Same here! Now to add another layer to this; certain Sonchus can be pinkish when the flower heads haven’t opened yet - which makes it even harder to tell apart from a distance!
The most commonly misidentified vertebrates that I encounter are the two species in the Gray Treefrog Complex - Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor) and Cope’s Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis). The problem is that the two species cannot be identified from a photo, so observers that are not experienced with this taxa will put one or the other name on there, usually H. versicolor (because it is a gray treefrog, I guess). Often you can make an educated guess based on geography, but in many parts of the range both species occur, so the only accurate ID from a photo is to the complex. The species can be ID’d from a call however, and those are usually distinctly one or the other. So one can also make an educated guess from a photo based on which species is known in the vicinity from calls.
There are documented cases of foxglove poisoning that occurred because the person mistook it for comfrey. The earliest foxglove leaves of the season do look almost exactly like comfrey leaves.
