New species of fungus identified via Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#51

Post by MattBlissett » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #32

I have a few photographs, (may be most people have too,) of a few plants/fungi and animals/insects I couldn't identify, even after consulting resources like Wikipedia. What is the best way to get a species identification from a photograph.

As azeirah writes, subreddits or Facebook groups for people interested in the particular group or location will often help.

For general wild plants and animals (and fungi and everything else) there's a computer vision tool from iNaturalist, which can be used independently [1], or when submitting an observation to the site -- by web browser or in the app. I usually start with that, then look at other observations on iNaturalist and Wikipedia pages for the species.

If the photos are of ornamental plants, I think PlantNet's [2] model is trained on them.

(I work at GBIF[3], where suitable data from iNaturalist[3b] and soon PlantNet is sent, and can then be freely downloaded and used in research etc.)

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo

[2] https://plantnet.org/

[3] https://www.gbif.org/

[3b] https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#52

Post by conistonwater » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #7

montenegrohugo wrote: post #4

> the new species has now been given its official name, 'troglomyces twitteri' Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :) As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?

It’s fairly normal for names of things few people are interested in such as insects and fungi. https://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/29/these-are-the-silliest-s... mentions, for example, Pieza pi and Spongiforma squarepantsii . Google easily gives you more examples, for example https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-str... , which explains the rules are not very strict: “The name must not be offensive, m…

> the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable

To be honest, I always suspected this.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#53

Post by schwartzworld » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

montenegrohugo wrote: post #4

> the new species has now been given its official name, 'troglomyces twitteri' Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :) As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#54

Post by mkr-hn » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

Myrmornis wrote: post #35

I may be wrong but I suspect that there are many undescribed types of fungi out there and describing a new species isn't that unusual and there is nothing of interest in the fact that the photo in question was on twitter.

They named it troglomyces twitteri because, as far as they know, this is the first time one has been discovered through Twitter.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#55

Post by jpindar » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

Myrmornis wrote: post #35

I may be wrong but I suspect that there are many undescribed types of fungi out there and describing a new species isn't that unusual and there is nothing of interest in the fact that the photo in question was on twitter.

Many HN readers believe that there is nothing on Twitter except politics and pictures of food, this is a counter example.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#56

Post by SllX » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

appleflaxen wrote: post #3

for the impatient: yes, it's what it sounds like. it's a fungus that lives on the reproductive organs of American centipedes. They noticed it in a tweet, and quickly confirmed it in their museum collections.

You missed the most important part. They named a parasitic genital fungus after Twitter.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#57

Post by neurostimulant » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #32

I have a few photographs, (may be most people have too,) of a few plants/fungi and animals/insects I couldn't identify, even after consulting resources like Wikipedia. What is the best way to get a species identification from a photograph.

You can post them to various relevant subreddits (/r/whatsthisbug, /r/mycology, etc). Identification requests are very common and people are receiving them well, so you'll likely to get some answers.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#58

Post by JoBrad » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #44

azeirah wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what they're called, but there are subreddits for identifying bugs and plants and stuff

Google (or quack) /r/whatisthis and the thing you want to identify. There's a bunch of subreddits like this. Here's a big list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/wiki/links

This is one of my favorite subreddits. I don’t think I’ve ever even posted in it. It’s like real life Sherlock Holmes sometimes. Quite often people will post a piece of a car involved in a hit and run, and it will be solved in minutes. Or someone will post the oddest looking item, and not only will it get solved, but you’ll learn a bit of background that you never knew.

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#59

Post by contingo » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

montenegrohugo wrote: post #4

> the new species has now been given its official name, 'troglomyces twitteri' Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :) As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?

In the past my research has overlapped a fair bit with alpha taxonomy. Actually, whimsically or unconventionally named species are fairly common. Here are three examples that come to mind.

[1] Forget Twitter, when it comes to species literally "discovered on the internet" I don't think you can top this one. In 2005 or so, specimens of a beautiful and striking sea urchin test, in the genus Coelopleurus, started cropping up on eBay as collectors' items. They were eventually confirmed as a new species. No, they were not named after eBay (the eventual choice of species epithet, 'exquisitus', was entirely fitting), but their status as the first new species determined directly from eBay specimens is pretty interesting, especially in bioconservation terms.

[2] Spongiforma squarepantsii is a fungus described in 2011. If you've ever eaten a bolete (a cep, or porcini, in foodie speak), then you'll know there are mushrooms where the gills are replaced with a spongey layer of tightly-packed tubes. In its extremely wet habitat, S. squarepantsii has become specialized from bolete ancestors to disperse its spores locally, by rainwater or animal transport, rather than by air, and so the entire fruiting body is reduced to a mass of convoluted sponge. From the Wiki article: "The surface of the fruit body has deep ridges and folds somewhat resembling a brain. It is sponge-like and rubbery — if water is squeezed out, it will resume its original shape... when viewed with scanning electron microscopy, [the spore producing-tissue] somewhat resembles a seafloor covered with tube sponges, reminiscent of the fictitious home of SpongeBob... Although the epithet was originally rejected by the editors of Mycologia as "frivolous", Desjardin and colleagues insisted that "we could name it whatever we liked"."

[3] In Borneo the other year I photographed a large, very hairy spider with bright red fangs that turned out to be a male color morph of a species named in 2008 as Heteropoda davidbowie. The linked Nat Geo article has more examples like that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/aug/17/uknews.taxon...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/10/explore-...

Re: New species of fungus identified via Twitter

#60

Post by erentz » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

graphpapa wrote: post #12

asimjalis wrote: post #11

> The photo shared on Twitter of the millipede Cambala by Derek Hennen. The two red circles indicate the presence of the fungus. I don’t see the two red circles in the picture.

There are two red circles, but there is nothing identifiable to the untrained eye contained within them.

Right. Can someone explain? One of the circles has a white dot in the middle that looks like it could be just dust. The other a faint dark dot in the middle again that looks like maybe just dust or dirt. Nothing really in them that doesn’t just look exactly like what’s around them.