What organisms have you been surprised to discover that people are unfamiliar with?

Well, they’re out of insects since 70s and in own class since 90s. It’s not a new layer though, a regular class.

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Here in S. California, every snake is a giant Diamondback ready to strike unsuspecting children and pets, even the 10-inch baby striped racer…

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And every largish spider that happens to be brown is a brown recluse :roll_eyes: . Even far outside the range of the brown recluse.

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I once saw a post on Nextdoor of a large, mildly brownish California Ebony Tarantula. The top handful of comments were people asking if it could be a brown recluse…

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The Nextdoor app can be a truly terrible place for misIDs. The correct answers to questions about an animal ID typically get lost among all the ignorant responses. I’ve largely given up on trying to educate anyone on that app.

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I don’t like the Nextdoor app for a lot of reasons. But you did remind me of this article:

https://blog.nature.org/science/2021/06/22/theres-a-wolverine-in-my-neighborhood-app/

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I think probably the poor old Crane Fly forever being called a ‘big mozzie’ and treated with the same disdain, yet they are extremely commonly seen.

Second prize to every wasp being called a ‘murder hornet’ and feared…

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The exact same thing happened to me when I was observing white breasted nuthatches in a local woods.

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“Herrings are gregarious?”

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Same in Texas…until someone post a photo of them holding a copperhead asking if it’s a garter snake. I can’t put into words how frustrating the combination is…

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Pretty much every misidentified plant on iNaturalist. I look at the picture, I see what they identified it as, and I think, “But it looks nothing like that!”

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I think you are describing the dark side of auto-suggest … :wink:

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I am frustrated with kids who know all the Pokemons including names, abilities and stuff, but they cannot tell an insect from a spider. When they grow up, they will change this perspective, of course. Then they know all the cars including names, abilities and stuff … still cannot tell spider from insect …

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I actually did a project where I asked everyone in my class to name 10 common plants in our area, 10 common animals in our area, and 10 Pokemon. More people could name 10 Pokemon than any of the other categories.

Granted, I’m also a huge Pokemon fan who can recite every piece of Pokemon trivia - but I can also identify birds by call so…

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On my hike 2 days ago I was photographing lichens, and a passing hiker stopped to ask what I was taking pics of. “What’s a lichen?” was his puzzled response.

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Most common names have no logic except tradition. Best not to expect logic there.

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I hope one of those three is the Rimu. I say that because when I taught biology in Tonga, using a New Zealand curriculum, inspectors who visited insisted that it was reasonable to refer to the Rimu on the school leaving and university entrance exams our students took because it’s an important tree. In New Zealand, maybe! Tongan kids had no idea what it was.

I remember a “water moccasin” (which doesn’t live in Iowa) that when described was clearly a blue racer (gray blue with yellowish belly, not spotted, about as different as a snake could be from a water moccasin).

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I would say tradition is a logic, those names are the same because those were new species for people calling them, if they lived with them for centuries and more, they’d give them different names. All old names (older than English names for NA birds) are strictly functional and simple, they can be hard to understand now by us just because we live in other circumstances and lack knowledge that was applied before.

Nope, I doubt if more than a few nature-buffs living in my neighbourhood, would recognise it, despite there being some lovely old examples tucked into the gully behind the houses, and several visible from the streets, which bound about 100 H of native forest.

The reason being, one rarely sees it. In fact I did not know what it looked like until I moved next to a kauri forest in 1987, and got a book about native trees.

Some of the older folks at that time would have known it, I suspect, but nature was not part of the school curriculum until recently, and I assume most people stopped learning names of any plants at all when they stopped gardening.

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