#and I know that's like impossible to quantify and would vary wildly by region
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Afternoon reblog, with a follow up question! Well, two follow up questions: 1. Do you know the venomous or otherwise potentially dangerous* animals that live in the same area you live in? 2. When you move to a new area (if you've ever moved to a new area), do you research to find out what potentially dangerous wildlife there is there? *not entirely sure how to word that, but I mean like not necessarily being able to identify the exact species of bear or whatever, but knowing that there are bears (or wolves, or mountain lions, etc) that you could encounter in your yard. For venomous snakes/spiders/scorpions you'd probably need to ID them by species or at least be able to say like "that's a rattlesnake", but you don't necessarily have to be able to identify what exact type of bear it is** to know that there is the possibility of a bear **yes I know that functionally different species of bears are very different to encounter but like ideally I would not want to encounter any of them in the wild, you know?
I realized that, like bird knowledge, I might've been overestimating what's reasonable to assume everyone knows about local venomous insects
#the person behind the yarn#spider tw#bug tw#no one in my immediate family does that research#but that's because I am The Animal Facts Person for the family#so they just ask me. like. they all just assume I will know#but that means I have zero idea whatsoever about what amount of general animal knowledge most people know#and I know that's like impossible to quantify and would vary wildly by region#but the not auto-classifying spiders by shape threw me for a loop#I think when I was a kid I read something once about how much more clearly you can explain a thing you see#if you know just a little bit about it. like with birds! like anisodactyl vs zygodactyl#where if you don't know the different categories you have to remember a bunch of different details in order to tell someone else#enough so that they can identify the creature. but if you know some categories you can see a creature and think#oh it's a passerine (or whatever) and then remembering all the traits inherent to the category gets a lot easier#because you have to remember one word instead of a whole bunch#I am way oversimplifying that but point is: as a kid if I could not find out the categories that really exist for animals#I made up my own so that I could remember details of animals I saw better and more accurately
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