The other day I had to explain to a colleague that doves are not female pigeons. She also thought mice were baby rats.
What's the dumbest idea about natural history that you've personally encountered? (Excluding creationism).
The other day I had to explain to a colleague that doves are not female pigeons. She also thought mice were baby rats.
I thought that muskoxen were a type of cow, but they are more related to sheep.
I had a teacher who taught the whole class that mammoths were ten times larger than elephants. I don't know where she got it from, but probably from cool looking drawings or her own imagination.
My mom has the bizarre notion that succeeding generations of plants will produce weaker and weaker seeds, until she has to buy new ones from the store. I asked her how she thinks plants reproduce in nature forever, and she says plants in the wild are different.
It's not the right logic but it's sort of true in many cases, the soil loses nutrients over time and the plants and vegetables do get worse/less nutritious
kek reminds me of this
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_DZKwCVKneg
When I was in middle school there was a movie coming out with a sloth in it and my teacher was talking to me about "the movie with the monkey coming out". I had to find pictures of sloths to show my teacher what they were.
I thought sloths were monkeys until a few years ago.
>"just buy a new one"
I can not believe how many fucking people still believe the "snakes will size you up to see if they can eat you" urban myth.
Especially the amount of people who claim it’s happened to someone they know
>hmmm yes constrictors are well known for their ability to do math
For me, it's the complete human inability to distinguish any yellow wildcat species that has black markings. I go to zoos fairly regularly, it's more rare for me to overhear someone correctly identifying a cheetah/leopard than it is for them to mix the two up. Even heard an adult ask "is that a baby cheetah?" while looking at a serval.
I get the average person not knowing jaguars vs leopards but cheetahs are pretty distinct so I'm surprised when people mix them up
My mom still thinks bugs aren't animals even after telling her multiple times they are
They are insects
insects are bugs but bugs are not insects
You know most people are not being specific when they say bug
??? thats what I said isn't it?
snails, roly polies, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, etc
they are all bugs but not insects
Hemipterans are true bugs, the rest are not. It’d be more correct to say all bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs
what about superbugs, are they bugs?
No, they’re supers
That all humans are classified as the same species/sub species and that people believe we somehow aren't affected by evolution and population genetics.
people thinking goats are male sheep
My mom once said ''isn't it weird how animals, like for example a giraffe and a bat, look completely different from one another whereas humans look pretty similar''
She did instantly recognize her mistake and doesn't want to reminded of it.
Also recently she thought monkeys (including apes) were a single species
That only female cows have udders, which reminds me of the Barnyard
>The reason all the male cows were designed like this in the franchise is because Steve Oedekerk figured that city folk thought that all cows would look like this.
Kek
I've had to explain to people multiple times that you can touch non parrot birds in places besides the head and that it won't make them horny. Theres over 10,000 species of birds out there, they don't all work or respond to stimuli like parrots do
Porcupines being the same as hedgehogs
Pangolins being the same as armadillos
My aunt thinks bears and pigs are the same species because female bears are called sows. My whole immediate family stared at her dumbfounded for a few seconds when she dropped that little bomb.
Another relative on that same side of the family was horrified when she learned ham is pig meat, and refused to believe it when we told her. She was (and is) an elementary school teacher.
>Ostriches burrow their head in the ground
>Mixing up ducks, geese and swans for the millionth time
>Lions and Tigers live together in the wild
>Mixing up leopards, jaguars and cheetahs for the millionth time
>Snakes are satanic and should be killed on sight cuz muh bible
>Dolphins and whales are fish
>Bats are flying mice (I know that's their name in German, but still)
>Humans aren't animals (in the literal sense)
I don't expect the average person to be an animal expert, but come on
>Mixing up leopards, jaguars and cheetahs for the millionth time
Literally meeeee
I have only recently learned that porcupines are rodents. I thought they were their own thing.
One of my friend's step-dad might be the most retarded person I have ever seen on this subject. Birds, reptiles, fish and bugs aren't animals and mammoths are dinosaurs with T-Rex being a synonym for them.
My teacher told me reptiles weren't animals "they're reptiles."
American education. It was this that led me to realize 99% of ~~*school*~~ is horseshit and ultimately it's just an asylum for children and not intended to actually educate children in any way.
>spiders are insects
>leeches are fish
>it’s okay to kill iguanas because they eat people
>x% of the ocean is unexplored, therefore megalodon is still alive
>koko actually knew sign language
I have met a concerning number of people who think ferrets are rodents
Well they are basically just long rats.
VOOT VOOT VOOT
They look nothing like rats.
I've had people be real cunts when I told them that killer whales aren't whales and that crane flies aren't lethally venomous insects whose fangs are too small to pierce skin (actual myth)
With the crane fly one I could tell by the silent glare on the guy's face after we went to google that he was just going to keep repeating it in future anyway. At least most of you fags aren't dealing with willful ignorance
>killer whales aren't whales
They are, you dumb fuck.
They're porpoises, technically they're dolphins, the largest species of them.
Dolphins are also whales, genius.
You’re right that orcas are dolphins, but they’re not porpoises. Also both porpoises and dolphins are toothed whales, hence orcas are whales
I just don’t worry myself about what others think anymore. Better to assume someone is an idiot about zoology and be pleasantly surprised if they say something intelligent.
I know what you mean, because people are only thinking about baleen whales, but orcas are still toothed whales.
My only 2 examples are meeting several people who thought you could tell a male or female cow apart by their horns (having horns means it's a bull).
I also sent a picture of a cock pheasant to a friend and he thought it was female based on the size alone.
Small examples but I couldnt imagine not knowing either
After getting chickens and telling people about my adventures, I learned that a lot of people don't know a cock/rooster is a male chicken and that hens are female chickens. The follow up question usually then "well, what's a chicken, then?" The idea that animals have a general and gender-specific names is a foreign concept to many people.
I unironically thought jackalopes were real until I was a college student.
Not my proudest moment.
Pigeons are not real. They are government surveillance drones
Then how come they were around before the 20th century?
Time travel
Sorry if im inviting pol but i still dont understand the thought process behind the cardboard
Pussied out of damaging the lawn or something?
I'm guessing because they were too lazy to till the lawn and just thought the cardboard would eventually decompose after a few months. I'm not sure how long they thought their retarded commune would last.
Ah.
Makes sense.
they're unable to plan 1 second ahead
Multiple reasons. Cardboard starves the grass of light and kills it. This is an alternate to tilling the ground and destroying the bacterial and fungal communities that already exist. The cardboard will break down if covered with soil as seen in pic and worms will hang around it as it stays damp so worms help make the soil better. It's not a foolproof system, but it's a good use to reuse something that would just go into a landfill.
Well, you'd usually mount the soil thicker than that too
WHY IS THERE SO LITTLE SOIL ON TOP OF IT?
WHY ARE THEY ARRANGED LIKE THAT?
It's a black owned garden
You're talking about people far removed from their food production who, in their ignorance and hubris, likely thought they knew better than those redneck, hick farmers and could do just as good as them(in reality far better than them considering how little acreage they had to work with) after seeing some guerilla gardening course/video somewhere.
Farming is a dead stupid job that is mostly automated these days. There's a reason 4H clubs are mostly girls and slow kids. I'm not sure where you annoying gays get this idea that running a farm requires genius level mind games and the raw grit of Daniel Boone but I suspect it's because you don't leave the house much. People tend to romanticize things they know nothing about.
>China thinks dogs are foods
>India thinks cows are gods
>Wauf thinks deer are fleshlights
>Wauf thinks owls aren't birds
I had to explain to a girl raised on a farm that chickens do not have buttholes.
Why is it that some male birds have willies aand others don't?
Someone I knew in university thought the yellow-flowered dandelions and the puffy white ones were different kinds of plant.
That's the only one I can remember right now, but I feel like I must've encountered more
Oh right. On university campus, group of students were passing by trying to figure out what the difference between astronomy and astrology once. I heard one guy say, "Astrology is, like, asteroids?"
And here am I being embarrassed that I confused astrology with astronomy when I was 10 because every other "real" area of study is named with the -logy suffix.
my adult sister wasn't 100% sure if elephants laid eggs or not.
My mother keeps saying that ducks are not birds.
I used to think cats were female dogs
No you didn't.
Had to clarify to friend once that cows arent female buffalo.
Fish aren't animals.
They're animals but they're not meat. Chicken isn't meat either.
Clearly they're plants
what kingdom do they belong in? Are fish plants?
And also insects
>Wait, snakes have a spine?!
Some girl I overheard in class back during high school upon learning that snakes are, in fact, reptilians.
I've known two people who thought snakes were basically big worms.
Some muslim guys were trying to figure out if it’s halal to eat crabs because they can’t eat amphibians, and crabs live in “both land and water”.
I mean, that's a valid discussion depending on the definition of "amphibian" used.
No, amphibians are members of the class Amphibia, there's no room for discussion.
An animal can't be called an amphibian just because is amphibious, it's like saying that all flying animals are birds.
According to The Pope beavers are fish.
But that's true, bats are a kind of bird. You're classifying shit according to common descent, they're classifying shit according to how you hunt and eat them, and neither way is wrong. Yes, one is better when you're trying to understand the world around you, but the other is better when you're hungry.
You can't just take a word and claim ownership of it like that. Crabs are amphibian.
>You can't just take a word and claim ownership of it like that. Crabs are amphibian.
kek good one
>Noooooo, thats not an amphibian vehicle because it didn't evolve from frogs
>Claaarrksoooon!
Imagine being this confidently retarded. Amphibian can refer to the taxonomic class, or anything which is amphibious
Yeah, like some cars are amphibious right? Crazy how far science has come.
Considering they're following rules made before biological classifications, the question was likely not biological in nature. It's more of a "what did Allah mean by this"
Amphibian is an adjective for something that can live both on land and in water. It predates the taxonomical term used to classify frogs, salamanders and caecelians.
So when the Quran or whatever said that it's halal to eat "amphibious" animals, it means to not eat animals that are semi-aquatic basically, and not exclusively the amphibians (as in the frogs and the rest). So they shouldn't eat crabs
What about land crabs?
As far as I'm aware, all crabs start life in water, so they're amphibious
In their defense, catholics had a similar issue when they traveled to SA and categorized capybaras as sea food so it wouldn't be wrong to eat them during certain times of the year. It's because they had no idea of what a capybara actually looked like so they just rolled with how they were described through letters.
Thank you for your service.
rly meks u think
Reminds me of this.
Someone thought otherwise?
The other marine is really dumb (if the story is true), but you must be some special kind of human trash to post stuff like this.
I had to explain to a biology student that sea anemones don't have a brain. This is not the most stupid thing I had to explain, it just baffles me that I had to explain to someone studying biology in the university level.
pigeons are doves doe
Doves aren't does doe.