I really like finding marine worms in the intertidal here on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington state. I feel fortunate that a curator of polychaetes (@leslieh) helps me with ID. This is one worm I’ll never forget, as it’s the only time Ive seen an Active Free-living Bristleworm:
www.inaturalist.org/observations/142030208
2 Likes
Fungi are just… hard to get confirming IDs on. There’s not a lot of people that ID them to begin with, sometimes people don’t know (or have the ability) to take the proper photos to ID them, and there’s a LOT of species that are next to impossible to ID without microscopy. And some species you need to know the species or type of tree they’re growing on or near. Suillus weaverae and Suillus granulatus are basically identical mushrooms but the former grows in association with white pines, and the latter I believe scots and maybe red pines.
Basically every time I take a picture of a red Russula species, I just put it at genus level and mark ‘ID as good as it gets’ because its not feasible possibly to ID them without spore microscopy and even genetic testing.
AFAIK Morchella is another genus that is really hard to get down to species without DNA testing. Just look at this key and at how many species are morphologically similar https://www.mushroomexpert.com/morchellaceae.html
EDIT: this doesn’t even get into how some American taxa are (or have been, up until recently,) being lumped in under old European names but DNA testing has shown them to be distinct enough to be different species. See Russula parvovirescens versus Russula virescens or the recent divorcing of American ‘golden chantarelles’ from the european Cantharellus cibarius.
5 Likes
Mycetozoa :)
Of course there are naturalists who know them and like them, but most people just don’t even look at them.
And apart from that, plants that look dull and greyish, that grow everywhere if the place is unattended, and don’t catch attention. That’s why I was the only iNatter in Poland to record Cyclachaena xanthiifolia, until last autumn. This sounds funny and I didn’t take it seriously because the biologists have observed that plant since the 1960s, but it was quite a satisfaction.
1 Like
I was told that the Field Guide to the Micromoths of Great Britain & Ireland is surprisingly helpful, even in the USA.
Mark Drieling’s website is not in the Pacific NW, but is on the West coast, wonderful photos:
https://www.pbase.com/m3ling/santee_moths
http://microleps.org/Guide/index.html
And the MPG website has a section of unidentified micromoths:
https://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/unid.php?famnum=1
And of course, their wonderful pinned arrays on MPG cover the entire USA, if you think you know the larger family, you can browse those.
And there’s the Torts website, tortricid.net, depending on how small you consider “micro.”
It is hard to define “micromoths,” but they are fascinating. The smaller, the better, IMHO!
3 Likes
Thank you for that tidbit and the other links. I’ll haunt the online stores and used bookstores to see if I can find a good deal. Once I get my dissecting scope set back up I will see if I can get some observations I can ID.
Phthiraptera and Trichoptera. Insect books usually give them way too little attention. One book even described Trichoptera as a “small” order when it is the seventh largest!
2 Likes
I havent come across any in the wild (yet) but Xenophoridae are crazy
1 Like
For over a decade I’ve been increasingly interested in millipedes. Every school kid and naturalist knows about millipedes in the abstract (i.e., a long wormy tube with lots of legs), but even as a zoology student I didn’t fully realize the diversity of millipede forms until grad school: from sausage-shaped, “typical” juliform millipedes, to roly-poly-like pill millipedes, to ornate “dragon millipedes,” to the bizarre pincushion millipedes, and beyond! Few of even my fellow biologist friends share my excitement upon finding millipedes in the wild. Despite their diversity and ubiquity in most temperate and tropical ecosystems, millipedes are massively understudied compared to insects, arachnids, and other terrestrial arthropods: the life history and geographic ranges of most species are very poorly known, and new species are still being discovered even in well-studied areas like North America. There is a dearth of popular literature on millipedes, relatively few experts and researchers, and lots of misinformation online: many species look superficially similar to each other, and are difficult or impossible to accurately identify from photographs alone. As a result, misidentified photographs and specimens are commonly encountered, be it on iNaturalist, Flickr, or even some books, scientific journals, and government websites.
5 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.