I live in Washington State, and for the past two years, I’ve been noticing that observers are calling anything vaguely orange and jelly-like Tremella mesenterica. Most of these are actually Dacrymyces,Naematelia aurantia,Calocera, or Guepiniopsis. People will choose to select Tremella mesenterica instead of a correct CV identification, even! Why is this happening? I’m guessing it’s because the common name “witch’s butter” sounds cool to people, and so people in forager groups call anything orange that name, and so it cascades down to inat.
I’ve also seen less science-minded authors like Ashley Rodriguez call Dacrymyces “witch’s butter.” Maybe that’s part of it? I know common names don’t really matter, but I’m getting a bit frustrated here!
It isn’t unusual for users to select a taxon by typing in a common name they are familiar with rather than using the CV. If they aren’t conversant with the scientific names, they may not realize that the taxon that iNat has found under that common name is something else (or they may not know that there are multiple species referred to by that name).
For a while there were observations of Laportea alatipes (endemic to tropical Africa) popping up in England and North America because someone had entered a common name of “nettle” for the species, so Anglophone users were entering it for native Urtica and other “nettles” (e.g. Lamium – deadnettles, etc.). The common name has now been changed to something less ambiguous, so the number of new observations in England has dropped to zero, but I see that N. America still needs some cleaning up.
I see some occasional similar mixups – e.g., bluebells can refer to a variety of unrelated flowers.
Sometimes it can help in such situations to change the common name (regional or global) to something less ambiguous, though it can be tricky to find a solution that reflects familiar usage while preventing accidental wrong entries. It does seem to have helped with the nettles, and with some bee mixups in the UK which puzzled me (the species do not look very similar) until I figured out that they were both referred to as carder bees.
it’s not a thing just in Washington. people often call any yellow jelly fungus Witch’s Butter in my area (Texas), too. i just figure that people don’t know what they don’t know or don’t see what they aren’t looking for.
but this is a common problem across many taxa. in my area, many folks call similar plants with bluish flowers “Blue Mist”, and even very experienced plant identifiers can mix up an unexpected Ageratum with a common Conoclinium.
and then, too, the science may change, too. the common invasive Mock Strawberry in my area had always just been Duchesnea indica because that’s what was known to be here, but lately, folks have been going around separating local observations into at least 2 different species (because there were multiple species here all along).
I think what really baffles me is they’ll deliberately override the CV even if the only suggestion is the correct one, manually typing in “witch’s butter.” I’d go, “Oh, well, they just don’t know better,” but then they go and do that!
I imagine it depends on one’s particular method of uploading observations. For some workflows (particularly with a slow internet connection etc.), they may not be “deliberately overriding” anything. If they think they know what something is and start typing a name, they may not see the CV suggestions at all because the system never has time to generate them.
Or if they have labelled the photo iNat will try to use the file name.
Or if the CV suggestions do not have a common name entered on iNat and all they see is the scientific name, they may think the suggestion cannot be not their “witch’s butter” and so they enter a familiar name.
Lots of possible causes that probably seem quite logical to the people doing so – if you really want to know, the best way is going to be to ask those users.
When I’ve asked, people say what I suspected: they were told it was “witch’s butter” by foraging groups. I was a moderator of a Facebook foraging page of about 70,000 people for a while, and I kept routinely, repeatedly seeing people all spamming id requests of orange jelly fungi claiming “it’s witch’s butter,” when it was Dacrymyces or something else. I spent months trying to correct these people, for up to hours a day. I’ve just given up now. I’m just confused by this cascading down to inaturalist. I really thought there was a slightly higher baseline standard than to just apply the coolest-sounding common name.
seems sort of like the peril of common names. maybe a lot of foragers don’t really care what the actual scientific name of their fungus is. all they care is that any yellow jelly fungus is edible, and since they’re all edible, there’s no point for them to distinguish between species. so they all end up as witch’s butter in their minds?
applying it to multiple taxa seems to me like it might the mess worse, since it could move the mess to multple taxa rather than one. there’s not really a good higher-level taxa to apply it to in this case, since Tremella and, say, Dacrymyces are already different at a class level.
i think it’s fine to leave things in they system as they are, and just continue to try to educate folks to look for the differences in the species. maybe if you’re dealing with a forager, you have incentivize them to learn the difference by claiming, say, Dacrymyces are more tasty than Tremella.
I have noticed something similar with Artocarpus. Almost every breadnut (Artocarpus camansi) is (initially) misidentified as breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis). This is in places where people commonly eat both, so you’d think they would know the difference. The only thing I can figure is that they think of these as being “different” in the way that we think of slicer tomatoes and cherry tomatoes as different, or bell peppers and jalapeno peppers as different; that is, different varieties of the same basic thing. Some of the local names for breadnut translate as “breadfruit with seeds.”
Ordinarily, I’d think that made sense, but in the case of Dacrymyces and Tremella, they’re not closely related. Couldn’t name “Higher Basidiomycetes” to witch’s butter LOL Common names are so troublesome sometimes!
Being human, we all come to iNaturalist with our own level of knowledge - and ignorance. If I’ve been told that this organism is ‘this’, I’ll almost certainly upload it with that ID until I learn better. And realistically I think that makes sense as an approach, even if it’s flawed because it relies on potentially unreliable information. I’m sorry (and sympathetic) that you’re getting frustrated by this - but hopefully each person is willing to learn, and maybe it eventually even gets back to the foraging groups if enough people do learn?
PS If I uploaded such fungi and there seemed too many similar-looking options, I’d probably just list it as fungi - not sure whether that’s better or worse! Fungi definitely isn’t my area of expertise.
Interesting. I’m in Oregon and most of what I see is Dacrymyces. Some are correct.
You could suggest they explore this link for a great explanation of the “witches butters” out there.
We have this problem with “buzzards” in my area, which locally refers to a vulture but people are not good at raptor ID so it can be basically anything large. I get the frustration. (Although it is hard to fault people who actually like vultures like they do in Hinckley.)
I don’t know if this would help with the number of species you seem to have involved, but it does seem to help here on iNaturalist that the name “buzzard” is listed as a common name for the most likely confusion species (in fact if I type “buzzard” in the search, the first suggestion is a Turkey Vulture, and Common Buzzard, the actual correct buzzard, is listed second).
Am I one of the culprits? If the orange jelly was on Ulex, I used to call it T. mesenterica because I thought it was the only Tremella whose host grew on Ulex in Britain and Ireland.
Then I got a comment: “Both Peniophora (the hosts of Tremella mesenterica) and Stereum hirsutum (the host of Naematelia aurantia) can be found on Ulex. Unfortunately, unless we see the host, we can’t confirm ID.” So I withdrew my id from that observation but I haven’t been through all the others to look whether Peniophora is visible.
I see a lot of Ulex and I have never seen Stereum hirsutum on it, but maybe that is because it all gets detroyed by N. aurantia. (Naematelia aurantia used to be Tremella aurantia.)
