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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is super hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things. I wouldn’t want to be the expert in that field getting asked all the time with a single iPhone photo.

/r/mycology had to say stop posting “please identify this mushroom” because it was so common. I’d imagine its easier with insects. And you don’t have as many people who care because they aren’t trying to eat them as often.

I still like to ID random bugs I find in my house and backyard and it’s always a probability exercise.

Those tree identification apps by taking a photo never work. I used it at a UofT garden where every tree was labelled and it got it wrong every time. So even the ML is way off.

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I read genomic data collected for phylogenetic analysis of non-hymenopteran species the way I do, I don't expect to find a single specimen of that species that I haven't seen somewhere else, either within my own field of study or any other. It is possible that some new species of hymenopteran may be found from genomic data, and that this newly discovered species will then become a member of the Hymenoptera, but it would probably not be of that group we currently consider. That's the thing: the current state of the hymenopteran phylogeny is that although the species of hymenopteran I consider most closely related to each other has been found in multiple specimens from multiple populations, they are a diverse group, with many examples of them from multiple regions. That's the kind of thing we would expect to see from a modern, large-scale genome analysis, but that is not how I see it.

> I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is super hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things.

There are a lot of mushrooms that are very easy to identify, and learning edible mushrooms is imho a lot easier than learning edible plants. But if you pick up mushrooms at random then yeah, it's generally extremely difficult.

A big part of learning what mushrooms are edible is identifying the ones that can harm you.

I mean out of the 2,000 mushrooms in North America, there are all of 20 or 30 that are seriously poisonous. So it doesn't take all that long to learn the most harmful ones. Especially since you don't even need to know whether or not a mushroom is harmful, only if it looks vaguely like one of the harmful ones.

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