Year in Nature Photography – Day 136

Swamp lily (Crinum americanum)

Most likely umbrella flat sedge (Cyperus involucratus)

Bird of paradise flower (Strelitzia reginae)

Swamp lily (Crinum americanum)

Bird of paradise flower (Strelitzia reginae) full plant

Golden trumpet (Allamanda cathartica)

Bee (Apis sp?) collecting from what appears to be peregrina (Jatropha integerrima)

Jelly burn plant (Bulbine frutescens ‘Hallmark’)

Oleander (Nerium oleander) and most likely China rose hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis) hedge

Day 4 of Florida Trip (pictures are in random order)

A lot of fruitful searching of Google 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 we are 100% (99% possibly) certain about results, we have to leave room for errors and other explanations, it is part of the scientific method. This is why it is very important that experiments are repeatable and well documented. In identification, things are changing constantly due to genetic analysis and different theories of species definition. As I’ve posted before, some things require microscopic observation to differentiate between species. All that aside a lot can be said for typing in ‘orange flower 5 petals Florida’ and then looking at the pictures for something that looks close. You have to be aware of the whole plant however, some flowers look similar but the rest of the plant is different.

All that being said, today I have identified some more non-natives that are used as landscape plants particularly in Florida. Before I get to the new non-natives I have another picture of a swamp lily (native) and there was a sort of hedge with oleander and hibiscus (2 additional non-natives), most likely the same variety of hibiscus that we have on our porch.

Umbrella flat sedge comes from Africa and has escaped and become established in disturbed wet habitats. Also from Africa, specifically the southern part, we have the burn jelly plant which at first I took for an orchid. Almost all orchids exhibit bilateral symmetry of their petals which means that if you cut down a single plane (the center/middle) you have two identical halves. However upon closer inspection of my picture it looked like the petals were actually evenly distributed around the center (radial symmetry) which eventually led me to find the burn jelly plant. Additionally from South Africa and also bright orange, we have the bird of paradise flower. Not to be confused with the bird of paradise bush I saw in Arizona.

For our next non-native we go to Brazil with the golden trumpet flower. Apparently the sap is highly toxic and all parts of the plant are cathartic (indicated in the scientific name) which means they act as a laxative highly increasing bowel movements (polite and scientific way of saying it all), so one shouldn’t ingest any part of the plant. As a general rule of survival I would not ingest any plant parts unless you have been well educated by a reliable teacher in the identification and preparation of edible plants.

The last flower I identified comes from the Caribbean and I caught a bee visiting this peregrina flower cluster. Apparently the leaves of this flower are highly variable which makes identification tricky if no flowers are present.

Year in Nature Photography – Day 100

The 100th day! Catching up on a back log of pictures so forgive the three posts in a row. I’ve been rather per-occupied lately but I’m not giving up on this project. One of the most interesting things about this project is that by forcing myself to figure out and ID things I remember them better. I also find it get’s easier to identify things as I often have to sort through many sites/keys and can sometimes remember that I’ve seen this that or the other species in passing. Today’s ID find was the rabbit’s-foot clover.

Rabbit-foot Clover (Trifolium arvense)

A differnt Lavender (Lavendula sp?)

Japanese maple leaf (Acer palmatum)

Year in Nature Photography – Day 87

The daylilies are starting bloom now so I snapped a pre-full bloom picture of one of them. I decided to investigate this white flowering woody shrub that my mother says is a weed t(he shrub is most likely one of the invasive forms of privet that get everywhere) and found a bunch of insects all over it. . Turns out they’re margined soldier beetles which can have some variety in their morphology (they way they appear). Beetles are in the order Coleoptera which means “sheathed wing” referring to the fact that most beetles have 2 pairs of wings with the front pair hardened and protecting the back pair underneath. This is what gives beetles the appearance of having a shell.

Also found a harvestman, also known as daddy longlegs which are arachnids, like spiders, and not actually insects. The general rule of thumb difference is that insects have three body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen) and 3 pairs of legs, while arachnids have two body parts (cephalothorax [cephalo is of Greek origins and means head] and abdomen) and 4 pairs of legs.

Daylily (Hemerocallis sp? var ‘Stella de Oro’

Harvestman or Daddy-longlegs (Family Opiliones sp?)

Mating Margined Soldier Beetle (Chauliognathus marginatus) spotted variety

Daylily (Hemerocallis sp? var ‘Stella de Oro’

Year in Nature Photography – Day 78

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.

Red Maple Leaf (Acer rubrum)

I think this is Wild Carrot (Daucus carota) or Queen Ann’s Lace

Silver Maple Leaf (Acer saccharinum)

Ladybug, possibly 7 spotted species (Family Coccinellidae, possibly Coccinella septempunctata)

Scarlet Oak Leaf (Quercus coccinea)

Red Maple Leaf (Acer rubrum)