What is your favorite animals and/or plants and why?

For me its a blue -bearded bee -eater
Cause it’s colours attract me a lot
And of course it’s distinctive call by fluffing its under neck part and a special pattern of fly

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My favourite animal changes when I learn something exciting about a species or when I find something special for the first time.
So a fairly recent favourite is Bilobella aurantiaca, my first springtail, in this great colour and finally the fact that I managed to take a reasonable good photo.
But it hasn’t yet dethroned Alphasida holosericea, a beetle that is endemic to the province of Málaga (not Spain or Andalusia!) and I was the first to upload it to iNat. When I uploaded the photo to my Facebook group and a specialist identified it, he sent me some papers and one said: “can be locally abundant”. I posted 6 individuals on one photo - maybe one m2 - and he said: I have to see this! He came and we had a really good excursion and I found a new friend. :-)

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I don’t even know if I could pick a favorite reptile, let alone favorite animal overall, but I really like some of the large colubrid snakes, like gopher snakes (Pituophis) and indigo snakes (Drymarchon). Drymarchon in particular reminds me of a cobra while not being venomous at all, which is both a big plus if you ever encounter one in the field, and a fascinating case of convergent evolution.

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I can’t pick a favorite plant/animal/fungus etc. so I’m probably going to go back to this thread multiple times in the future adding new ones. From flowering plants, I think the genus Impatiens is pretty fascinating! Unfortunately, most of the plants you find in my city are invasive (Impatiens glandulifera, Impatiens parviflora), but I still really like them.
I feel like they’re almost like a dicotyledon counterpart to orchids. Both have diverse, bright, weirdly shaped flowers with some fused floral parts, and in result some flowers are shaped like animals or little people. The flowers vary in structure a lot to attract different pollinators. I’ve even seen many people on Internet who are unfamiliar with plant classification confuse Impatiens plants with orchids due to their flowers!
Not many Impatiens species grow where I live, so most of my impressions are from the internet.
Click here to see all of the different species

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Too many to count, but if you look at my favourite taxa page, you’ll have a good grasp of what I’m drawn to in general.

I love elephants because they are beautiful, majestic, clever, loving and family-oriented towards one another, and can be deadly dangerous. It almost sounds like an oxymoron but it isn’t.

They are hugely vital animals that impact their environment in myriad ways, and are important to us humans culturally as well. Their relatives in the far north, the mammoths, continue to capture human imagination thousands of years after their tragic extinction.

As I was reminded by these amazing creatures on my trip to Kruger National Park in October last year, elephants are their own creature, and they do not love us or hate us (when we leave them alone in peace). Because of their size, they own their space, and they know it. In my encounters with them in Kruger, I felt that I was communicating and interacting with intelligent creatures. Not as smart as humans (but then, humans without any education won’t seem very smart to an educated person, and certainly I think there must be some elephants smarter than some humans out there). The Kruger elephants reminded me that we share this planet we call our home with all manner of other creatures, and it is important that we leave space for them to live. Not only for the sake of our environment and our species’ survival, but psychologically, culturally, and spiritually as well: we need to recognise that we’re not the only sapient species out there, and that large, powerful animals make the world a better place overall.

For similar reasons, I love big cats as well: environmentally important, magnificent to behold, deadly, and inspires the human imagination across cultures and time.

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