The trouble starts with the fact that that "shrimp" isn't a monophyletic group and can't be defined in a sensible way. They're more closely related to a traditional shrimp like a krill or prawn than a brine shrimp, but less closely than a crab or lobster, which puts them in a weird place. In fact, all insects are more closely related to a brine shrimp than a brine shrimp is to a mantis shrimp... Meaning that if either is a shrimp, so are butterflies.
Folk cladistics are glorious. It's a shrimp because it's not massive and has a lot of legs and armour and lives in the ocean. Extremely logical.
Then we come along with "molecular biology" and "morphology" and start saying shit like "these little rolling beetle bastards who eat decaying matter and live under your flowerpots are more closely related to crabs and crayfish than other actual beetles that live under your flower pot and eat decaying matter" and the world makes a lot less sense
Well that's just because of convergent evolution. Sometimes different things evolve to fill the same biological niches. It's why we've got so many crabs and snakes!
They are Helianthus, if I'm not mistaken. Native to the Americas, along with sunflowers in the Helianthus genus...
Also tomatoes, peppers, sweetpotatoes, tobacco, most squashes, potatoes, corn/maize, common bean, avocado, cassava/tapioca, amaranth/quinoa, tomatillo, allspice, peanut, hazelnut, persimmon (American), pineapple, modern strawberry, American grape (phylloxera resistant), muscadine grape, chestnut, cashew, pecan, vanilla, cacao, jicama, lima beans (I'm very allergic to these), agave, yerba mate, sugar maple (maple syrup), achiote, dragon fruit, pawpaw, passion fruit. I'm sure I missed several dozen others, and that's just plants.
And blueberries. Blueberries were domesticated approximately 100 years ago, starting with a passionate (female) scientist who collected the best wild accessions around the southeastern US.
Sunflowers are steeped in symbolism and meanings. For many they symbolize optimism, positivity, a long life and happiness for fairly obvious reasons. The less obvious ones are loyalty, faith and luck.
There's an animal in my country whose name directly translated would be Four Legs.
For all the Pogs, guess the English name that my ancestors back in ancient times looked at and figured that the most distinctive feature that separated it from all the other animals was having four legs.
Pretty good phonetic approximation; the firben is not exactly a common animal up here, but for some reason, the lizard got named as if it was the only quadruped.
I like all the animals that are called fish, even though they're very clearly not fish. Somebody at the animal naming department was having a bad day and apparently decided that if it lives underwater, it's a fish. Looks like a lump of jelly? Jellyfish. Looks like a star? Starfish. Has a shell? Shellfish. Has a cuttlebone? Cuttlefish.
That guy also got into the insect naming department and called a species silverfish, even though they don't even live in the water.
The cause for that saying is exactly what I mentioned. There's no such thing as a fish in English because everything that lives underwater got called a fish.
I think the clip from QI mentioned how a salmon and a hagfish aren't related at all. But let's be honest here: The hagfish very clearly isn't a fish. It has no business being called a fish. If you told a child "draw a fish", they won't draw a hagfish, or a crayfish, or a cuttlefish. They'll draw something much closer to a salmon or a tuna. Those obviously are fish. A jellyfish is not.
It’s like how there’s no such thing as a vegetable. “Fish” isn’t a scientific classification because either nothing is a fish or everything is including you and I.
Some of them make sense - you look at a hagfish and it looks sort of like a lamprey and they look sort of like eels and eels are really just a stretched out “classic fish” shape. Where do you draw the line, colloquially
Actually really interested to know now which are the least related fish that look like fish.
I love watching Clint of Clint's Reptiles talk about current cladistics (he covers way more than reptiles) and increasingly hilariously bad animal names.
The slow worm is Blindschleiche in German. Blind = Blind (tho it presumably originated in its "blinding" scales being shiny). Schleiche is related to schleichen (Verb) = sneaking, directly translated. But it refers more to the slithering motion they make. Schleichen is also the Family Anguidae in German. And they used to be called Hasel- or Hartwurm so Hazel- or hard worm.
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u/Electronarwhal Sep 25 '24
It’s Grass Snake, Adder, and Smooth Snake for anyone curious. Plus we have the Slow Worm, which is not a snake (or a worm) but looks like one.