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monopoliessuck | 29 days ago

I added Jellyfish and then Portuguese Man-o-war.

It took the man o war, but crossed out Jellyfish and said "added a vaguer term", but a jellyfish and a man-o-war are discrete animals.

The man-o-war is a colonial siphonophore composed of zooids, while a jellyfish is a singular marine organism.

They're both in the phylum Cnidaria, and that would have been a more vague term had I entered it.

discuss

order

cainxinth|29 days ago

It raises the question: can a colony of individual animals (zooids in this case) that work cooperatively be called a singular animal itself? I think biologists say yes, but it’s an interesting taxonomic boundary.

baxtr|29 days ago

AFAIK, a "super-organism" composed of individual entities is defined as one where the long-term fitness interests of those individuals and their groups are completely and permanently aligned.

For example an ant colony is a super-organism. That’s why it makes sense for a soldier ant to die for her queen.

eru|29 days ago

We think cows are singular animals, despite being made up of lots of different organisms with different DNA. (Much of the diversity happening in the gut.)

Scarblac|29 days ago

I think the bacteria in your gut outnumber the human cells in your body.

4gotunameagain|29 days ago

yeah there are lots of inaccuracies.

I added bobcat, then lynx, and it would not accept lynx because bobcat was there.

Oh, and, 77, just woke up. No coffee.

Sharlin|29 days ago

"Lynx" can refer to either the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) specifically, or to the genus Lynx and the four extant species in it (Eurasian lynx, Canada lynx, Iberian lynx, bobcat). And the game recognizes all the four lynx species as distinct animals if you use the full names. In general it understands imprecise common/genus names as hypernyms of the more precise species names, which is the correct way to do it IMO.

In general, of course, even distantly related animals may share a common name due to superficial similarities – what is "robin", for example? The American robin was named after the European robin by analogy, simply because both happen to have a red breast. The two species aren't even in the same family.

yellowapple|29 days ago

Likewise, it wouldn't accept “panther” because “tiger” was already there:

> I assume you mean “panther” in the general sense of any big cat.

Why on Earth would it assume mean that, of all things, rather than “black panther”? If it's gonna be pedantic about it, it could've complained about “leopard” and “jaguar” already being there (which they were) instead of complaining about an animal that nobody in their right mind would call a “panther”.

lelanthran|29 days ago

114, here, because it allows extinct animals (sabre tooth, Mammoth, stegasaurus, etc)

Also, things we normally don't consider animals - tapeworm, aphid, etc.

Also accepted blue whale, sperm whale and orca :-/

NooneAtAll3|29 days ago

that's like saying tomato is a fruit

in biological journal, sure - for practical purposes straight up no

if it looks like a jellyfish, stings like a jellyfish and behaves like a jellyfish - then it doesn't matter what it looks like under a microscope, it is jellyfish

the_af|29 days ago

Portuguese Man o' Wars look distinct enough from jellyfish. Their sails make parts of their bodies float above water, something no jellyfish can do to my knowledge. I can confuse species of jellyfish but there's no confusing the man o' wars...

bigDinosaur|29 days ago

Many people now know that a tomato is a fruit, and will distinguish it with exactly the 'did you know a tomato is not a vegetable?' fun fact, so I'm not sure this is a great point. If someone asked me to list vegetables and they were being rigorous about it I wouldn't list a tomato. If they're not being rigorous about it then anything goes really - sometimes you can put things like apples in a salad so that must be a vegetable as well.