Where do people get the ability to identify things?

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DonSchaeffer
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Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2020 10:06 am
Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Where do people get the ability to identify things?

#1 Post by DonSchaeffer » Thu Feb 11, 2021 3:30 pm

I'm astonished how people can identify the protists. Where do you get the references or the skills or the knowledge?

TonyT
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Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2020 8:30 pm
Location: New Brunswick, CANADA

Re: Where do people get the ability to identify things?

#2 Post by TonyT » Thu Feb 11, 2021 4:30 pm

Probably best to start with books; unfortunately expensive
This book does a good job for all the inverts, including protozoa
https://www.amazon.ca/Classification-Am ... 560&sr=8-1
New Brunswick
Canada

Heliozian
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2021 12:01 am

Re: Where do people get the ability to identify things?

#3 Post by Heliozian » Thu Feb 11, 2021 5:09 pm

I'm using Das Leben Im Wassertropfen which does a pretty good job of covering a lot of groups of organisms which you might find in a water drop. It is a handbook though - a guide - but not an academic text for identifying to species. I've just ordered Freshwater Algae, Identification, enumeration and use as bioindicators which I think sits half way between Das Leben and a more scholarly book such as The Freshwater Algal Flora of the British Isles which runs to 878 pages is priced accordingly (and at 878 pages doesn't even try to cover the diatoms!)
Web sites like www.arcella.nl are useful but even then I think it takes time and experience and possibly getting down to the nitty gritty of academic papers to be able to be definitive rather than speculative when it comes to species. I can fairly often feel reasonably secure with a genus name but I generally use species names in parenthesis and with a question mark because I really can't be sure.
I'm not an academic but an enthusiast so I don't need to identify to species level as a re searcher might. Bear in mind that a researcher might spend most of the first year of a PhD just getting to grips with identifying a small sub section of what we might find in a water droplet - but they really will know their area in a way that I will never do.
I think the simple answer to your question is the some one as given by an old musician to someone who innocently asked "how do you get to the Albert Hall" - "Practice my boy - lots and lots of practice!"
https://www.instagram.com/iansmicroscopes
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tlansing
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Joined: Sat Aug 01, 2020 3:15 pm

Re: Where do people get the ability to identify things?

#4 Post by tlansing » Sun Feb 14, 2021 10:11 pm

A great place to start is the beautiful book by Martin Kreutz and Wilhlem Foissner, The sphagnum ponds of Simmelried in Germany: a biodiversity hot-spot for microscopic organisms (Protozoological Monographs, volume 3). This book has spectacular photos of algae, protists and small invertebrates. It is also downloadable or you can purchase it as a book (and it's not too expensive). Also try searching Google using "freshwater algae: identification pdf". I found a very useful pdf that has a key to freshwater algae identification. The www.arcella.nl site mentioned previously is also useful, as is the Penard Lab website: http://www.penard.de/Introduction/

Placozoa
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Joined: Tue Jan 05, 2021 10:41 am

Re: Where do people get the ability to identify things?

#5 Post by Placozoa » Mon Feb 15, 2021 3:25 am

I answered this question in another post, but I will do a quick recap here.

For me, I have two trade tickets, and a University education in mining engineering. None of this is relevant to microscopy so I am basically starting fresh. I took up an interest in gardening 2 years ago, and I took it seriously. I found studies that show every plant species in my area and where to find them. I went and actually looked for some in the wild with some success, but thats another story. I live in a rainforest so there is a crapload of them and getting to them can and does cost people their lives around here. I did up a taxonomic tree for them, this is simple and quick for plants as a lot is known about them, then I did up a phylogenic tree for them. Timetree.org was a lot of help with this and it was done in a month or two.

Now that I had a reference point for what I was looking at, I toured around local botanical gardens, I toured local commercial gardens, and I toured some large private local "touristy" gardens as well. At the time, I also worked as a professional gardener, mainly doing private flower gardens, but also doing occassional commercial flower gardens. Never touched a lawn and I wouldnt, I am not a labourer, and there is nothing much to know about lawns. I learned a lot from the experts at the company I worked for, and it was all hands on, plenty of practice identifying stuff there. This knowledge was spot on, learned a lot of latin, and learned how things are organized, and most importantly how to organize them to make sense of them.

These techniques I simply applied to microbiology, but its a bit sketchy because the knowledge humanity knows about them is much less complete and and also less organized. So same thing, tried to find a list of them (ended up being impossible, nobody knows a complete list of them for this area). I watched a lot of videos, microbehunter, microcosmos, links from elaine ingham (soil microbiologist), and just general snooping around the internet. At this point I bought myself a good microscope, which quickly led to buying another one (they breed like rabbits). I gave away the toy microscope I had before and rarely used. And now that I had some idea of what I could put on a list, microarthropods, nematodes, rotifers, ciliates, dinophyceae, diatoms, flagellates (this was wrong, I found out later), etc. I already had fungi sorted from earlier, I knew the chromista existed and had fucales and brown algae in it. I put together a list, drew up the taxonomy on it and set to work.

I wanted my taxonomy to be recent, no sense learning and unlearning a bunch of wrong stuff, so I started with the Cavalier-Smith stuff. My list was not the best, I wanted local soil stuff, and I had global soil, freshwater, and marine stuff. I avoided medical (pathogen) stuff. I have since found better resources, and I would suggest using Adl, et. al. (2018) in combination with silva and adding on other resources where necessary. I would suggest avoiding books as a primary resource, they will be expensive and hopelessly outdated, but they are handy once you already have a system in place, can spot the outdated information, and just want some detail or a key. After this I set to work on a phylogenic tree.

Putting together a phylogenic tree is a personal task, you wont find one anywhere, the error bars are wide, and this is probably why (nobody wants to look stupid). It is pinned down in spots with test (testate amoeba) and shell (diatoms) fossils, we know the order everything evolved in (again, with some error, you need to judge what to believe), and enough scientists have done enough research on this that the information is there you just have to put it together. Doing this is hard, but you learn a lot about ecosystems, lifecycles, and characteristics of various microbes. How it all fits together, basically.

After this, you can learn to recognize stuff by making your own photographic key (Im doing one of those, its useful and interesting, it gets faster and easier the more I do it); you can learn the lifecyles of various critters, I have seen them all in passing but I really should focus on this task and nail it down better; and now I identify stuff from my own samples. I know I cant get the species exact, the exact pattern of cilia, eapecially on a fast moving ciliate, is not always observable with my skills. Perhaps if I was willing to experiment with various mounting media to slow them down, dyes to sharpen them up, and throw some serious cash at DIC I would have more successs, but those will come when I am ready. I can identify stuff, with varying depth (I know its a nematode, I know what it eats, thats it; or I know its a rotifer, I know its a bdelloid rotifer, I know its in such a such family and genus, but I dont know which species), that was what I wanted. I dont mind being wrong, but I want to have a pretty good idea of what the chance I am wrong is, and not spread too much wrong information (misidentifications) around. Better to say the genus than it is to guess at the species if I really have no idea.

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