#Metazooa

[pathetic-gamer]

‼️fun game alert‼️

guess the mystery animal by guessing animals and seeing how closely related they are!

[markscherz]

Hi Mr. Scherz! Since you didn’t like the design of metazooa, do you know of any other similar games that you liked more?

I play this great game called 'iNaturalist' where you can sit and try to help identify organisms based only on photographs and locations. Amazingly, the photos are all taken by real people and show real organisms, and even better, by helping to ID things (as long as you are doing it competently), you are actually contributing useful scientific information!

You can search by location and/or organism. So, say I want to go and look at all the orchids observed in Texas… I can just get a list of orchids that have been observed there, and go through and ID whichever ones I know.

This is a FANTASTIC way to get familiar with a fieldguide to a specific kind of organism for a specific area. So, say you want to get good at identifying frogs of Australia. You buy one of the books on Australian frogs, open up iNaturalist, and go through and see if you can key out/identify each photo. You have to take into account that the fieldbook might be outdated, but still, this is *super* useful.

Important: the app for iNaturalist is only really good for uploading your OWN observations (oh yeah, you can do that too!). If you want to play the ID game, I strongly advise using the browser version.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

have u done the metazooa dot com daily guessing game thing

I have! I enjoy it, but it's mammal biased. like heavily

[ousama]

gonna start doing this everyday again yay

🐪 Animal #325 🐊 I figured it out in 8 guesses! 🟧🟧🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩 🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 8

[lizardsfromspace]

I thought my favorite Metazooa category was "it is a group of animals whose anus develops before their mouth" but then it gave me "any rodent with a hystricomorphous zygomasseteric system". Oh wow, yeah, a hystricomorphous zygomasseteric system. Really narrows it down chief

[jtbb]

[theinnermeyoullneverknow]

Learning about animals today

Pangolins, which I had heard of but didn't know much about. And I still don't, but I can now tell you that they remind me of armadillos and that Sunda Pangolins are critically endangered. Specific species because Metazooa started all of this and that's the link they gave me.

Civets, which I didn't remember having heard of before, but I had to have because: 1. Masked palm CIvets were tied to the SARS outbreak 20 years ago. And 2. Asian Palm Civets are involved in the production of kopi luwak (aka "cat poop coffee"). Both of these are things I was familiar with, but I never could've told you the animals' names. The photo on the main civet Wikipedia page is an African Civet, and I think they are so stinking cute (and also funny-looking, like a hodge-podge of hyena, racoon, and house cat). I mean all the civets I found photos of are cute, but that one's my favorite.

And speaking of kopi luwak, here's the dude who made it world-famous on how the animals involved in it's production are now treated (which is horribly)

I feel like no wildlife post is complete without a way to help, so here is an organization in India which helps various species-- including civets and (to a lesser extent because they being endangered makes them rare) pangolins (although generally not Sunda Pangolins, as India is outside their native range), and has a 100% rating on Charity Navigator:

I had wanted to find organizations specifically focused on Sunda Pangolin conservation and on the welfare of civets in coffee production, but didn't have much luck. But that's ok, I really like the type of work that Wildlife SOS does.

[girlwarlock]

So i was playing Metazooa (a game where you have 20 chances to guess an animal, with each guess refining your information about what cladistic group the animal falls into) practice rounds and a thing happened:

"Is it a seagull?"

"No; it is in the 'has bilateral symmetry' clade, though, but it's not any closer than that."

"it must be a millipede."

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

this game is rlly testing my bird knowledge -_-

[metazooa-everyday]

Day 3 - 27/02/24

Red panda (Ailurus fulgens)

m3/0

Fun fact! Red pandas were called pandas before giant pandas were!

This was a pain to draw, though i did enjoy it, i really like red pandas, they are so cute!

[enthusispastic]

Metazooa Stats

🦮 Animal #137 🐍

I figured it out in 4 guesses!

🟧🟩🟩🟩

🔥 10 | Avg. Guesses: 5.6

#metazooa

[markscherz]

Do you know about the animal guessing game Metazooa? If not, I think you might like it.

I do! Apparently I am even mentioned in it? But I am not a big fan, because the selection of taxa is just way, way too small, and the system for guessing is not intuitive or logical for me.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

megazooa is fun but it’s a really small sample pool and also as someone who Enjoys Bugs there are Not A Lot Of Bugs

I mean for real. and what is with them having like five types of lizard one of which just being "lizard"

[saribibi23]

Daily Animal Walkthrough 8/30/2024

Hi everyone (and there actually is an everyone now because I have two followers instead of just one!!), welcome back to another daily animal walkthrough! We’ve been getting pretty lucky lately on these daily animals; lots of things from other phyla besides Chordata in here. So, I’m going to get right to it with my first guess of human!

OH YEAH! It’s going to be a good animal! As you probably already know, getting Bilateria means that this animal isn’t a chordate! Although I have a feeling that this animal is going to be super-duper interesting (not an Arthropod or a Mollusk either), I’m going to make what I’m pretty sure is one of the mathematically best guesses of fire ant, a hymenopteran insect in the phylum Arthropoda.

Ooh, ok. It is an arthropod, but not an insect or anything else closely related to an ant. This means it’s in Chelicerata, which includes arachnids, sea spiders, and horseshoe crabs. I’m going to guess a spider because there are more of those in Metazooa than any of the previous things I mentioned, and the mathematically best guess here has to be an arachnid.

So, it’s an arachnid, but not a spider. I’m going to guess a scorpion, and if not that then a tick or a harvestman. This is one of those clades where you can’t expect to win in three guesses like you can with some mammals. Other phyla tend to take longer because we don’t know as much about them, so more things are considered to be equally related to each other and there are fewer distinct clades.

Nice, the answer is going to be the other type of scorpion that’s in the game! 

I win! That was a pretty good game. Although I could have gotten it in 4, we can’t be lucky everytime, and 5 is legitimately the perfect number of guesses that I could have had without winning any coin flips. Hope you enjoyed today’s daily animal walkthrough!

And, if you made it all the way to the end, here’s the new daily animal question:

Are you afraid of any arachnids like spiders and scorpions, are you an arachnid lover, or are you somewhere in between?

[louderfade]

i am not good at this so it's fun bc i get to do learning. it's like mindmaze on encarta in that they direct you to the article.