Have you ever felt like you knew one of the big groups of living things. Maybe you think you know a bird when you see one… even the strange ones. Maybe you think you know bees, or maybe you know ants.
But then you see a creature that’s in the group you know that you’ve never seen before and you have to recalibrate. For me that’s Lioponera. Until you look closely they don’t really look like ants at all.
All the time with plants, there are so many look-a-likes and complex genres. In particular, “how on earth was I supposed to know that I needed to photograph that!”
For example Baronia species need a photo of the tip of a petal to show if it’s curved or not and some Senecio species require microscope photos of the hairs on the seeds to identify them.
I’ve found so many taxa like this I had to start a series of guides for myself to know what I need to photograph
There’s something about barnacles, you feel like they should be a bivalve or somehow related to sponges. Nope, they’re a arthropod and related to crabs.
Also, the genus Dictyonema, it’s a genus in the Hygrophoraceae, the waxcap mushroom family, but it’s lichenized with cyanobacteria. For those who aren’t lichenologists in the crowd, most lichens are in a totally different group and are lichenized with green algae. There is even a species which grows on the surface of leaves: D. sericeum
Didn’t barnacles almost drive Darwin crazy? Like he was crashing out because of barnacles.
I don’t exactly study lichens and I’m certain you wouldn’t just make something up however I will be fact checking that second one. Is that even still a lichen if you replace both parts??
Lichens are defined by the mutualistic relationship (a fungus providing structure and a photosynthetic microbe providing sugars) not by taxonomy. It can be any taxon of fungus and any taxon of photosynthetic microbe.
Absolutely plants. I’ve been an animals person most of my life and only started really looking at plants in the past few years for work purposes. I’m based in Western Australia so we have some doozys here. Last year I got my mind blown discovering the existence of Daviesia aphylla, which I was confidently IDing as Exocarpus aphyllus because I didn’t even know Daviesia aphylla existed at the time, and unless it’s flowering they look almost identical.
Horsehair worms (Nematomorpha) were definitely a “what the heck” moment for me. The ones I’ve seen looked like living spaghetti noodles flicking around the woods. I’ve only seen them a few times, and the only time I managed to get any photos resulted in a fairly poor observation.
EDIT: Oh, shoot. Or maybe I’ve been seeing Mermithidae this whole time… Welp. Either way, those groups are weirdos!
I enjoy pointing out to people that sea squirts ( Ascidiacea), those innocuous looking blobs that occur on tidal rocks all over the world, are members of Phylum Chordata which in evolutionary terms means they are more closely related to we humans than an earthworm (Phylum Annelidae) is to a flatworm (Phylum Platyhelminthes). https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/117646436
although i have no classical training, i am fairly confident with my basic insect taxonomy and can usually reliably identify any bug to order and sometimes family.
bug, which i couldnt get to order at all. it was under 1cm which didn’t help, and i was so frazzled. the eyes look dipteran and the wings look coleopteran, and cv had no idea because kenya and africa in general is underrepresented on inat.
i ended up emailing dr stephen marshall who is a dipterist at guelph but whose bug knowledge is quite extensive and he id’d it for me as an auchenhorrhynchan there’s always a weirdo outlier for bugs!!
The first time I saw a picture of Hydnora, I genuinely thought it was photoshopped. It’s a parasitic plant with no leaves, and its only above-ground organ is a large reddish flower that produces a foul smell to attract pollinators that look for dung/carrion (in that sense, it’s similar to the more well-known Rafflesia). Imagine a miniature sand worm from the Dune movies, it’s basically what it looks like!
For a long time, I just called them ‘alien eggs’ because I had absolutely no idea, and then they turned out to belong to a group of organisms that I had seen in the adult and juvenile stages dozens of times. I had a similar ‘Wow! Really?’ moment when I first learned what larval ladybugs looked like.
Pretty much anything non mammalian/fish that’s in the sea. I see things rockpooling and I don’t know if its a worm, a mollusc, a bivalve, a crustacean, a jelly (whatever they are), a coral, a plant, or some other thing. I just can’t make any sense of the shapes or forms of any of them. It’s only time I’ve every uploaded things with the ID ‘life’.
Ladybug larvae, Scaly Dogwhelk eggs, the first gall I ever saw (Renosterbos bud gall midge, thought it was the flower!), Lachenalia which I thought were orchids, Moquiniella rubra which I thought was some kind of flowering creeper (turns out it is a mistletoe), first time I saw fasciation on a plant I thought I hit a new species:)
Plants always comes up with something new and sometimes I honestly do not what I am photographing and then it turns out it something new or something I never thought it would be.
oddly enough it was the pygmy hog. I had listed all mammal species (using an outdated source) once before and when I reveiwed Suidae it felt like this weird little pig had appeared out of nowhere. A nice slice of humble pie! I will say Porcula salvania is currently in its rightful place in my personal list of mammals (now much more up to date).
Within barnacles there’s Sacculina, which looks more like a fungus. There’s a whole infraclass of similar barnacles (Rhizocephala). Also within Crustacea are the subclass Pentastomida, which are sufficiently odd to have been considered a phylum in the past. Parasitism and morphological reduction has repeatedly evolved within Crustacea.
Among annelids two former phyla (Pogonophora and Vestimentifera) have been reduced to groups within the annelid family Siboglinidae.
there’s always a weirdo outlier for bugs!!