One perpetual battle when identifying organisms is that the common names frequently lead us astray as to the characteristics of the organism. They can be overly generic descriptions that fail to capture anything unique about the species, names that suggest the species is in the wrong taxonomic group…

The damselfly, Ebony Jewelwing. Shouldn’t it be Jeweled Ebonywing?

Great Egret - it’s pretty common. I mean, it’s ok but maybe not great.

[image] paul_dennehy: Maybe it’s my eyesight, but the Red-spotted Purple ought to be the Orange-Spotted Black-and-Blue They vary a lot (sometimes red, sometimes more orangish). I don’t know if the name refers to the red spots on the dorsal side (which some RSP have), or those on the ventral …

Our arum lily, is neither an arum, nor a true lily.

[image] rcavasin: Common names for recently described species that are just transliterations of the scientific name Yeah, this are a problem. We’ve tried to avoid these for moths recently, with mixed success. A bad one is Epipaschia superatalis, which was briefly moved to the genus Macalla, g…

the genus Calopteryx is ‘jewelwings’ and the ebony one has black wings, but yes!

I should bookmark your post so I can use it as a cautionary tale when somebody asks why we shouldn’t just transliterate scientific names. There should be a rule in iNat explicitly forbidding it, to cover cases where someone creates a bad common name outside iNat, and then it gets ported into iNat (…

[image] paul_dennehy: butterfly count results with zero C. philodice and dozens of C. interior reported on a regular basis, and I imagine it must be the common name messing people up To be fair, some philodice are frustratingly similar to interior (they lack the normal field marks that distin…

The Black-headed Gull doesn’t have a black head but its lookalike, the Mediterranean Gull, does. The Elephant Hawkmoth is only medium sized. Here in the UK there are four bigger resident Hawkmoths, none of which have a size based epithet in their name. [Hawkmoths] The Common Slowworm isn’t a wor…

Your favorite common names that confuse identification

Nature Talk

AdamWargon August 31, 2026, 2:27pm 2

This thread covers a similar topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/confusing-animals-taxonomy-misconceptions/

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Your favorite common names that confuse identification

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