I’m a naturalist, and one of my favorite things in the world is finding something in nature that is not only new, but that I can’t even begin to describe. The mystical naturalist might be satisfied with admiring the humbling magnitude of nature’s diversity, but not me. For me, this is the primal information retrieval experience, and since I spend all my time inside in front of a computer, I generally tap the Intarweb when books fail me.

Here’s how I went about it in a few cases I can recall:

Wingless mantis?!

I had only known one kind of praying mantis where I grew up, and I was never particularly concerned with exactly what species it was. When I got out to California and found this little guy, I didn’t know what to think. It was small, wingless, and skittish, very un-mantislike as far as I was concerned. In order to find a list of mantids in the state, I actually had to turn to the Google Books edition of California Insects, a slightly outdated but mostly comprehensive guide to the state’s insects. Searching inside the book for “mantid” brought me to page 74, which describes the female minor ground mantid as sometimes having short wings like this. Still not 100% on the ID, but this was the closest I could get.

Leafy … thing

I saw this growing on what I think was a hazelnut, by a stream in a redwood forest in Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. I figured it was some kind of liverwort, but it wasn’t until I posted the picture to the livejournal plants community that someone told me it was actually a lichen! A lungwort lichen, to be specific. I lacked the vocabularly to even describe this beast, but online community came through for me on this one.

Pretty mystery slug

This is Cuthona abronia, a nudibranch, which is a kind of sea slug. I have a field guide to the nudibranchs of the West Coast, but this one clearly wasn’t in it. I felt confident about the genus based on the information in the book, but nothing quite matched the combination of colors. It wasn’t until I started searching through lists of known species like this one that I finally found one that wasn’t in the book (not the most efficient strategy). This picture seemed to match fairly well, too.

Weird scary black beetle shooting white stuff out of its butt!

Back when I was a wildlife biologist, I was monitoring the dredging of a canal near San Bruno, and one of the workers described a weird bug he’d seen like this. Sadly, even though I was the professional bio guy, I had no idea what he was talking about. Frankly I don’t remember how I ended up IDing it, but I do remember Googling about and finding some confusion regarding itse scientific name. I just include it here because it looks cool.

The lesson here is that IR for biodiversity information can be difficult, often for very simple reasons like a complete lack of vocabulary for describing an entity in nature for construction of a search query. Many of the more comprehensive sources of info out there like Animal Diversity Web, Tree of Life, and BugGuide are all ordered by taxonomic and/or systematic rank, which is perfectly orderly and logical, for the most part, but completely inaccessible to non-experts. They also tend to use vocabularly that the layman might not be familiar with, like “arthropod” (segmented invertebrates with a hard exoskeleton, like spiders and insects) and “echinoderm” (sea star, sea slugs, sea urchins, etc.) I’m not sure what the ideal solution is for a domain as large as “life,” but I can imagine ones based on color, shape (oekaki-like drawing interface?), Cyc-like association (bees might seem more like flies than ants, even though they are more closely related to ants), or by prominant features (searches for “jaws” bring up things with prominant mandibular hardware). Then again, I’ve had the most success with querying a community of real live humans, like the LiveJouirnal plants, entomology, and mycology communties, and the Flickr ID Please group.