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Metaflora

flora.metazooa.com

88 pointsPaulHoule15 comments

There are so many missing species that I spent more time hunting for plants in the database than trying to deduce the mystery plant.

Related discussion on the animal version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37184046 Metazooa (metazooa.com)

2023-08-19 (21 comments)

If you want to see garden food phylogeny tree, I made this a few years ago in D3 and NCBI data using ETE3 (in Pyodide) http://observablehq.com/@thadk/garden

I'm not a biologist but here's a thread of things I noticed following it clockwise: https://mastodon.cloud/@thadk/109971022004345501

You know, I never considered that almost all plants we eat are angiosperms (flowering plants, monocots + dicots).

I immediately went looking for exceptions and found a few:

- fiddlehead ferns

- pine nuts

- juniper berries

- gingko nuts

- nori (red algae), kombu (brown algae), and kaipen (green algae)

But, almost everything else, is an angiosperm.

It asks me to enter a species and I can't enter Latin plant names?

This was the biggest frustration for me. I knew the Latin names it showed me on the right, but I didn't know the English names for my guesses.

Neat. But somewhat confusing that it's missing some common plants. (A few I found: honeysuckle, broccoli, turnip, jalapeno, kale.)

Broccoli and kale are both brassica oleracea and are included under cabbage (another cultivar of the species). It has support for aliases though, so I don't get why it doesn't use that in this case. Broccoli is my archetypal brassica and I always get hung up when it isn't there.

Brassica oleracea is such a fascinating species by the sheer number of unrecognizably different vegetables we've cultivated that all technically remain the exact same species (it's way, way more than you'd think). If you've never looked at the table on wikipedia, please scroll down and take a look!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea#Cultivars

This also tripped me up. I didn't think to try cabbage. I did think to try brassica which is my preferred way of referring to the species.

I've been thinking about how to gamify my hobby site Related How? (https://relatedhow.kodare.com/) for ages. I can't tell if this is a good way to do it, since I am so bad at plants :P

there's an animal version of this too: metazooa [1]

I used to play a few of their [2] games daily, but have fallen out of the habit.

[1] https://metazooa.com/

[2] https://trainwrecklabs.com/

Neat game. I would appreciate if the full tree animation could be turned off, it's not needed for every guess. Maybe just one new sprout could be animated.

Deeply unsatisfying that it doesn't fill in the tree with the result after you randomly type in 20 plants and get nowhere near it.

Hey, cool. I won and learned some stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com