So a lot of times you’ll see me give my best guess for species that I’m photographing and include sp? for species unknown. Our system of naming things in the natural world originates from work by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who is known as the father of taxonomy. Taxonomy: the branch of science concerned with classification, esp. of organisms; systematics. (from the dictionary). If you learned “kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species” in biology you learned the system based on his work. Since the advent of modern genetics though, they’ve added domains and things have shifted around quite a bit. We now have sub-families, sub-orders, etc. as well. Also we have renamed the science to Systematics, which uses genetics and genetic relationships to organize organisms.
While some things are fairly easy to identify, such as most birds, insects and many plants are another story. Consider that flies, which are the family diptera (di=two ptera=wings) consist of over 150,000 different species identified by scientists. To figure out individual species often involves a microscope and counting the veins on the wings! Plants can be a little easier but with hybridization (which is when two species blend and how we get many ornamentals) they can also be difficult to identify without a microscope. Add to the fact that species are being renamed based on genetics and you’ll see why many times I just have to guess. I’ll save the whole definition of a species debate for another post.
Identification from a picture isn’t always possible as you often need to look at the organism as a whole and then down at smaller parts. In the case of animals, they aren’t always “co-operative” enough to get a good reference shot. For instance, the ladybug in my picture, I didn’t get to count the spots, but some times you just have to take the shot and run with it. A lot can be narrowed down by region, even if there are 300 different species only 10 of them may exist in the eastern US.
In the case of plants, the parts that actually differentiate species don’t always make for a nice picture. Flowers are often the primary way to identify and thus you have a narrow window in which to catch the flower. Even then often you can only get down to family or genus. So once the wild carrot flowers, I’ll know for sure I ID’d it correctly.
I have a few books and most of what I figure out is helped by the internet and past experience. I have three leaves here, red maple, silver maple, and scarlet oak. Trees are best identified by their leaves and branches. This involves looking at how the branches branch, the shape and edges of leaves, as well as number of leaves. Here’s a link to arborday.org that you can use to try your hand at identifying trees in your own yard or town.
So identification is a whole field of study in and of itself, but it can be a lot of fun (more than a bit nerdy) to learn a bit about what the names mean and to be able to identify things for your friends.
phototerrascientia 
July 24th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
[…] images has enabled me to pretty confidently identify the plants in today’s posts. To recap a previous post, I often use words like ‘might’ or ‘could’ because in science we never say […]