What are some things that you have learned doing IDs that are very simple but wasted a lot of your time when you first started out. A big one for me is that in taxonomy the terms “North America” and “Eurasia” aren’t used much. Instead it’s “nearctic” and “palaearctic” … when I want to find a species key these are like magic words that make the search work.
Don’t search for “North American Camponotus” try “Nearartic Camponotus”
It makes total sense to use these terms, but I don’t think most people are familiar with them. Are there corresponding words for the south? nearantarctic? palaeanarctic? Those seem to not be a thing.
What are some little things you’ve learned that you wish someone would have just told you.
Nearctic and Palaearctic are biogeographic realms - they don’t correspond to North America/Eurasia per se. You can see them (including Antarctic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogeographic_realm
The Old World (Europe, also Africa around the Mediterranean, and Asia) Pale-Arctic
The New World (North America) Ne-Arctic
Then they discovered Africa South of the Sahara, Here be Dragons !
And South ! America
And Australia even More Dragons !
I am Afrotropical 18C inside. Includes my tiny mediterranean corner and the Namib desert and Karoo semidesert. 
(I battle with American spelling. There is a hidden Greek dipthong there. Not pale vs dark, but palaeo = ancient. Altho I don’t know how Americans SAY it ?)
Waste of time ?
Took me a year to learn that most of my Notifications need a reaction from me. Answer the question. Correct my mistake.
If you do ask a taxon specialist for help. And you get a kind and helpful answer. Thanks is not the right response (and it triggers another notification for working scientists / active identifiers) The CID algorithm demands 3 to agree against your wrong ID (please withdraw at least, if not convinced)
Thank you both! Just yesterday I was wondering about this and hadn’t found time to look it up. Very helpful!
Yes. They aren’t identical. They are more sensible since they align better with habitats and ecologies.
In reading I’d learned what they meant but didn’t know that more papers and books would use “nearctic” and “palaearctic” preferentially.
I can thank the ant Camponotus nearcticus for cluing me in that there were better words for these regions. I always like to try to understand WHY a creature has a particular name. At first I thought that this ant might be “nearly from the Arctic” which doesn’t make any sense if you know these ants they hate the cold and can’t overwinter as well as other Camponotus from the same regions.
I then read that the ant is “from the nearctic” and realized there was a better way to describe these divisions.
Species complexes are a thing that exist and they make identifying tricky. They’re groups of species they all look the exact same and require examining some weirdly specific detail to tell them apart, and they aren’t always captured in iNat photos. Some can be distinguished with the naked eye (ex. “Look at the length of the white patch on this moth’s underside”) but others require dissection and a microscope.