Poison Ivy Quiz

February 4, 2023 6:15 AM

Is this poison ivy?
posted by swift (93 comments total)

Leaves of three, leave them be, leaves of four, eat some more!
*enters quiz*
wtf these all have three leaves!

So anyway I live in the city and don't go outside, do not trust me about plants, ever, is the new motto.
posted by phunniemee at 6:30 AM on February 4, 2023 [17 favorites]

[ laughing ] well at least i wear long pants and long sleeves when i go outside
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:35 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Poison ivy is not a thing where I live. Like you gotta go deep into the woods to find poison oak. I was utterly thrown to go to the East Coast and find out (a) that shit just grows like, out in the burbs everywhere, and (b) "leaves of three, leave them be" did not clarify ANYTHING to me at all.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:37 AM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

it's plants! not skin irritations thank god.
This quiz could have been SOOOOOOOOOOOO much worse -

41/55 first go round - that dammed Virginia Creeper is a dead ringer.
posted by djseafood at 6:43 AM on February 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

40/55, which I’m fine with because better a false positive than getting poison ivy.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:43 AM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

never has the FAFO acronym come so in handy
posted by chavenet at 6:44 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

"leaves of three, leave them be" did not clarify ANYTHING to me at all.

It’s not a rule to clarify anything. It’s more of a “If you don’t absolutely know what this 3-leafed plant is, leave it the fuck alone” rule. Good words to live by.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:44 AM on February 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

Here in the mid-Atlantic poison ivy will absolutely just show up and start climbing your fence, so this is relevant to my life.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:45 AM on February 4, 2023

I’m also fond of the old axiom, “don’t put plants / in your pants.”
posted by aspersioncast at 6:46 AM on February 4, 2023 [22 favorites]

44/55. I used to get poison ivy terribly. All year. Dead of winter. I learned how to spot it fairly well. Virginia creeper got me, too.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:52 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

52/55. It's a sneaky plant; it can be ground cover, just a vine, or stick out from a tree as if it were a branch of the tree. I've seen poison ivy leaves over a foot long.
posted by Happy Monkey at 7:04 AM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

45/55, not bad given I haven't lived in a country that has poison ivy for almost 30 years. Kept getting fooled by jack in the pulpit (because the photos didn't show the pulpits) and hog peanut, whatever that is.
posted by Athanassiel at 7:06 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

47/55. I wish it told you how many false positives vs. false negatives you had; I'd much rather make one kind of error than the other.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:06 AM on February 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

What I've learned from this quiz is that I've been mistaking poison ivy for a benign weed my entire life and yanking it out of gardens with my bare hands may not have been the best idea. Maybe I don't react to it all that strongly.
posted by Stoof at 7:08 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

This quiz taught me that not all poison ivy leaves look the same. Some have smooth edges, some have more toothed edges. Some are big, some are small. Some are shiny, some are more dull. Some have red veins, some have no visible veins.

Sneaky buggers.
posted by swift at 7:15 AM on February 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

41/55 first go round - that dammed Virginia Creeper is a dead ringer.

I got the same score. Most of my errors were false positives, rather than missing poison ivy, which is at least erring on the side of safety if not accuracy.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:20 AM on February 4, 2023

51/55. Done in by a couple of smooth edged plants that were not PI. PI is everywhere around our driveway and stream bank. It is almost impossible to get rid of without using Roundup, which I would never do.
posted by Xurando at 7:21 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I failed this quiz back in summer camp. I was the camper who made a plaster cast of a poison ivy leaf. When I got home my horrified mom dunked me in a bath of calamine lotion to deal with the itching.
posted by tommasz at 7:21 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

52/55. As a teen I had poison ivy so bad one time that I couldn't bend my arm for almost a week, so I got good at identifying it. One thing to look for is that while the leaves may have spikes, they are not serrated like, say, blackberry leaves. Also, they look almost identical to box elder leaves, which I don't think showed up in the quiz.
posted by dirigibleman at 7:22 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

41/55, not bad! I kept getting tripped up by hog peanut, which I've never heard of before and is apparently tasty. The risk/reward isn't worth it though.
posted by Sparky Buttons at 7:22 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Quiz is especially tough as the images are not the same as seeing the plant in person. You can’t look at more of the stem, or examine other parts of the leaves not shown, etc, etc. I can ID it pretty regularly, don’t know how sensitive I am to it but the one time I did get poison ivy (a small mild rash spot on one arm) it was from using a wrist-thick ivy vine to climb a tree. Yes, I knew full well it was poison ivy, but I needed to get up that tree to rescue a stuck toy plane. I figured, I was like 16 at the time, hadn’t ever had a strong reaction, and damn it I wanted my plane back. Wash with soap and water afterwards, you don’t want urushiol on your skin.

Goes without saying, be extra careful if you are picking leaves to use as toilet paper.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:23 AM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Did pretty bad. But in the wilderness, I have managed to avoid it by wearing long light pants and keeping my hands to myself. The last time I caught poison ivy was the year before last, and it was either from a dog, a cat, or the handle of a garden tool, all things that I'd handled after they'd apparently been up in it. I then proceeded to not wash my hands for a while, and, well -- it was miserable. Spent a couple of days in a Benadryl nap.

Stoof: we have a relative who could and would handle poison ivy with no problem. She loved to garden and would even come over to ours to pull the stuff out. She still does love to garden, but for some reason, she can't handle poison ivy anymore --
posted by Countess Elena at 7:23 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Leaves outside, run and hide.
posted by wreckingball at 7:31 AM on February 4, 2023 [34 favorites]

"Yes" is the only safe answer I've found to the question.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:32 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have a collection of poison oak-a-likes I've been meaning to turn into an Instagram post but they're not very high res and I've forgotten what about half of them were. Oh well, I'll have to go hiking again.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:33 AM on February 4, 2023

ye olde axiome:
"Nuke it from space, it's the only way"
posted by djseafood at 7:33 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, just leave them all alone.
posted by jquinby at 7:34 AM on February 4, 2023

So many memories. Not good ones. The Ozarks, the East Coast...In Colorado it's not a problem.

Now, old, I'm not so allergic to urushiol anymore. I've test-brushed a few leaves to see if I had developed an immunity to it, and: no painful itchy rashes! Just now, I did a quick Google search about this, and discovered that starting with young adulthood, one loses one's terrible childhood sensitivity to poison ivy. So my magic medical immunity theory was hogwash. Hog peanut.

But I'm not going to try eating it, something someone supposedly did in our family's circle of friends to prove he was not allergic to it. You can imagine the alleged result. I imagined it vividly in my childhood.

(I aced the quiz: I know it when I see it. I can help city people in the Maine woods now.)
posted by kozad at 7:37 AM on February 4, 2023

49/55 whoohoo!
posted by Gadgetenvy at 7:41 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

What's face blindness but for plants? Because apparently I have that.

I appreciated the ferns they put in there. I know poison ivy is not a fern.
posted by mark k at 7:42 AM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ok, now I've taken the quiz (46/55) poison ivy at some points sure looks like poison oak! I aced the blackberry spotting (of course, I've been fighting it my whole life) but agree Virginia creeper is a very good lookalike. We have Japanese clematis here that throws a lot of people off because it looks like poison oak when it's young but unfortunately it looks a LOT like poison ivy too so some of the poison ivy just looked like clematis to me and I would have been a sad panda. 🐼
posted by fiercekitten at 7:43 AM on February 4, 2023

46/55, I feel pretty confident I can ID poison ivy or be smart enough to not mess with anything I’m not sure about
posted by jazon at 7:51 AM on February 4, 2023

51/55. I've never heard of swamp dewberry or Boston ivy, or seen wild sarsasparilla, but I'm on to them now. In New Jersey, poison ivy is our unofficial state plant. It's everywhere, so much so that we can't help noting when we don't see it.

I agree that it's harder to identify the plant with a photo versus seeing the actual plant (the same is true for birds as well). Virginia creeper can be tricky to separate from poison ivy sometimes, but it's much easier seeing the actual plant. With a little experience, hog peanut would be hard to misidentify when seeing the actual plant, it looks a lot different than poison ivy.
posted by mollweide at 7:54 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

The universe gave me allergies to many, many things, including, for some reason, vanilla. But then the universe realized it went a little overboard with the allergies, so saw fit to make me immune to poison ivy. Which is good, because I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up, and I did absolutely awful on that quiz. (Apologies to my younger cousins, who dutifully followed me through so many patches of poison ivy when we were kids because it didn’t occur to me that they were not immune.)
posted by Ruki at 7:54 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

They should do one for poison sumac; much trickier
posted by TedW at 8:02 AM on February 4, 2023

42/55, so ok?
posted by medusa at 8:12 AM on February 4, 2023

55/55. This post made me finally sign up!
posted by GiantSlug at 8:13 AM on February 4, 2023 [28 favorites]

Stoof: we have a relative who could and would handle poison ivy with no problem. She loved to garden and would even come over to ours to pull the stuff out. She still does love to garden, but for some reason, she can't handle poison ivy anymore --

Yeah I just googled "poison ivy immunity" and it seems that repeated exposure can increase your sensitivity. I'm definitely not touching it with my bare hands again! I'm embarrassed because I was taught to watch out for poison ivy many times as a kid, but never connected it to the familiar reddish vine that's invaded all my gardens.
posted by Stoof at 8:18 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

39/55. The poison ivy in the areas that are relevant to my interests is pretty consistent... three waxy leaves with smooth edges and a reddish tinge that gets more pronounced during autumn. They droop in a way that reminds me of sullen teenagers. I got a lot of false negatives in this test because the examples don't look like the plant that I am familiar with.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 8:26 AM on February 4, 2023

You guys confused by Virginia creeper - that has leaves of five! It's also rather invasive, at least here: leaves of five, sure to thrive.
posted by amtho at 8:37 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

When young I worked one summer on a USDA Ribes Eradication Crew. Ribes (currants and gooseberries) is the intermediate host for White Pine Blister Rust, and the idea was to eliminate all Ribes plants in and within so many miles of the White Pine forests. We memorzed the shape of all the Ribes species we were likely to encounter, then off to walk 4 abreast through the woods, with the supervisor on the outer edge dropping a string to mark what had been done. We had diggers made from a piece of old leaf spring on the end of an ax handle, and used them to dig out the Ribes plants and hang them by their roots from a tree branch so they did not reroot. You really got fixated on the shape of Ribes leaves (sometimes I would dream about them), which led to several situations where I would be waist deep in poison ivy before I even noticed it. Showering later with liberal application of Fels Naptha soap was how we treated it, but it was usually too late to do much good. Needless to say, after a while you managed to look out for TWO kinds of leaves at the same time.
posted by ackptui at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

44 / 55. As others have noted this is harder than necessary because the information provided is just incomplete for ID'ing a plant.

I've started using the built in plant identifier in the iOS camera app. That requires a certain framing of the plant/leaf to function reliably, but it frankly astonishes me with its capabilities. Little baby plants, weird plants someone put in their yard, and invasive species - almost never an issue for it to sort out.

In fact I used the feature to convince a neighbor that they were harboring a Tree of Heaven that needed to be annihilated immediately.
posted by zenon at 8:47 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've seen Virginia creeper leaves with three instead of five leaflets, so it definitely helps to see the whole plant.

If it makes anyone feel any better, poison ivy berries are an important winter food source for birds. They're not exceptionally nutritious, so they're not anyone's first choice, but they last through the winter without rotting, which means they're available when a lot of other foods aren't.
posted by mollweide at 8:54 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

When I was young, I did not react to urushiol producing plants until I had contact with them many times. It was a similar story with my peers, when they were kids they thought they were immune to poison ivy, and then several years later they would react strongly to poison ivy.
posted by GiantSlug at 9:02 AM on February 4, 2023

Wait a MANGO fruit has the same irritant as poison ivy?? I learned about urushiol in the context of a good friend having a mango allergy (just when peeling it), my bookish childhood apparently never took me into the deep woods, nor did my suburban upbringing involve anything about nature's dangers except the creeping horror of 17-year cicadas all emerging at the same time.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:10 AM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

TIL (not for the first time) that I am bad at identifying poison ivy.
posted by OrangeDisk at 9:11 AM on February 4, 2023

Yep mangos and cashews have the same poison as Poison Ivy. I got 48/55 mostly falling for some false sarsaparilla which I think I’ve never seen IRL. And I haven’t lived in PI country for 25 years so I feel good about my score. I found the strawberry plant to be really funny for some reason.

(My mother is one of those obnoxious-about-not-sensitive to PI types. It was handy as a kid because she’d rip it out with her bare hands like some sort of giant, if it encroached on the yard. Alas the nearby woods remained brimful. )
posted by janell at 9:20 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I believe it was from MetaFilter from whence I learned that some people are immune to poison ivy. Fully expecting to be one of the genetically gifted, I purposely rubbed some of the leaves (easy to find on my property) over my hands. And lo! No reaction! Some time later, I was using a handheld brush cutter to clear a trail, wearing minimal clothing. Turns out, your first exposure is a freebie, it's your second exposure that payment becomes due!
posted by xmattxfx at 9:32 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Virginia Creeper:
Virginia Creeper grows all over my yard, in with my ground cover. And I get a couple of poison ivy seedlings per year (via birds, I suppose.) So I learned the difference! I yank out the poison ivy with a plastic bag over my hand -- easy.

Virigina Creeper has 5 leaves when mature, but new branches and seedlings often have three leaves. The leaf shape is a dead ringer for poison ivy!

But: poison ivy has a longer stem on the middle of the three leaves. Creeper has very short leaf stems, all the same size. And poison ivy leaves are asymmetrical on their two sides, unlike some of the woodland plants in the quiz.
posted by jjj606 at 9:35 AM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

53/55 I have a pretty bad reaction, so I learned well to ID it. Missed one PI, and called one Jack-In-the-Pulpit PI.
posted by Windopaene at 9:40 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

urushiol is also the active ingredient in the lacquer tree. It’s even worse than poison ivy, but it sure does make stuff shiny!
posted by leotrotsky at 9:42 AM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

a MANGO fruit has the same irritant as poison ivy??
It does. The urushiol is in the skin. I can eat mango, and I love it. But I have to be careful, or get someone else, to take the skin off.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:43 AM on February 4, 2023

43/55 which is much better than I expected, although reading through this thread beforehand definitely helped.

I might be (knocks wood gently) one of those people who aren't sensitive to poison ivy. Despite living in an area where it is very pervasive, and also as one who does a lot of off-trail hiking, I've never gotten it to my knowledge. Although, one time hiking to Buttermilk Falls, I got a blistering rash on the back of my hand that eventually looked like a chemical burn and seemed to radiate heat. I never figured out what caused it.
posted by slogger at 9:48 AM on February 4, 2023

But: poison ivy has a longer stem on the middle of the three leaves. Creeper has very short leaf stems, all the same size. And poison ivy leaves are asymmetrical on their two sides

that's super cool, I will still be proactively salting the earth in my yard whenever I see leaves of three
posted by paimapi at 9:49 AM on February 4, 2023

What's so unfair is that most other animals don't react to urushiol at all. Even worse that your dog or cat can carry it on their coat and you get it from petting them.

I wish we could come up with a way for us to get vaccinated to be as unaffected as birds or dogs. It would make a lot of us less miserable.
posted by emjaybee at 9:56 AM on February 4, 2023

39 / 55. I'm basically doomed, right?
posted by lock robster at 10:08 AM on February 4, 2023

What's face blindness but for plants? Because apparently I have that.

It used to seem strange to me that I could be so bad at recognizing people's faces (not quite face blind, but tending in that direction) and so good at identifying plants and birds. Then I realized that they're actually opposite skills. To identify poison ivy, you need to ignore the unimportant individual differences between plants - this one has more deeply toothed leaves, this one has more little reddish new leaves, etc. - and focus on the key features that distinguish poison ivy from other species. When you look at people, it's not enough just to identify them as human, you have to notice all the little individualities that distinguish that particular face from other faces - the kinds of individualities you want to look past in plant or bird ID.

At first the pictures in the quiz were all easy and I was pretty sure I was going to get 100%, but I ended up getting 2 wrong. Some of those photos were hard to assess because they only showed a bit of the plant. I'm sure I would have gotten them all right if I had seen the plants in real life.
posted by Redstart at 10:27 AM on February 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

52/55. I've had a lot of experience eradicating poison ivy in several properties to protect my kids. At the first house I bought, the vine had run rampant for decades, and getting rid of it took all summer because I was adamant about avoiding herbicide as much as possible. The next year after I cleaned up the forest, I was rewarded with a glorious surprise crop of lady slipper orchids!
posted by Miss Cellania at 10:36 AM on February 4, 2023

Failed miserably on this despite spending my first 40 years in the northeast... I gave up trying to recognize poison ivy a while ago and just treated all of those lookalikes like they could be poison ivy. And it may just not matter, because even Virginia creeper does unhappy things to my skin. In 10+ years in living in MA yards that were edged by little forest areas and swamped with poison ivy and other hostile leaves, I never got the poison ivy outbreak with the blisters and all that. We were horrified to discover that a tree we were cutting down one day had poison ivy vines long dead, but an inch thick and strong as cables. We just never never never touched any weedy things without gloves and never did yard work without long sleeves, socks, and pants (cuz of ticks too), and then would fully disrobe right inside the door and put things right to the laundry. I did have a couple run-ins with some kind of irritation that went away within a day and with one tick bite, but I think I did alright. Now I have moved and am instead regularly attacked by the thorns of our lime tree and convinced that a scorpion is hiding beneath every leaf I rake, but no more poison ivy!!!
posted by Tandem Affinity at 10:38 AM on February 4, 2023

This is so useful, thanks, but would be more useful if you could go back after getting an "Incorrect!" answer and look at that pic again to help solidify your understanding. I really don't give a shit about my score; I care about learning to identify poison ivy.
posted by mediareport at 11:09 AM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a lifelong West Coaster who has never seen poison ivy (or several of these other plants) I feel okay about 47/55.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:28 AM on February 4, 2023

Mango irritates my mouth. Especially when I eat a whole one at one time.
posted by amtho at 11:56 AM on February 4, 2023

I got 31/55, which isn't bad, since I'm a brit, and have never seen poison ivy in the wild. I do know someone who is not sensitive to PI, and he was very annoyed to find that we don't have it here. as he had been looking forward to doing his party trick of handling the stuff without any reaction.

Incidentally, I am partially face-blind, but normally very good at identifying plants.
posted by Fuchsoid at 11:58 AM on February 4, 2023

Yes, humans are the ONLY species to react to urushiol - it's apparently quite tasty to deer and other herbivores. And yes, mangos and cashews are in the same family. For all sorts of info and weird facts about poison ivy/oak/sumac, I highly recommend This Podcast Will Kill You/In Defense of Plants podcast crossover ep.
posted by gingerbeer at 12:10 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

We bought this DC suburb house winter 2021 and moved in very early spring 2022. Someone really cared about the backyard once upon a time. There is/was A LOT that looked like poison ivy, and I had 2 yr olds who touch and climb everywhere. After looking at every website and IDapp, I decided I had one horrible option: I know I react to poison ivy, so I carefully segregated and sacrificed my left hand. I rubbed that hand all up in it.
Lucky me, for several reasons, its not poison ivy (and the kids have never reacted to it), but I'm adding it to the "parental sacrifice" tales I can tell to them when they're older.
posted by atomicstone at 12:35 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am an expert in poison ivy identification because the woods around my property are full of both poison ivy and just about anything else that could be confused with it. I wouldn’t have been able to point it out before I lived here, but I blew through this quiz very easily and only missed one (I’m not familiar with hog peanut but one of them looked a lot like poison ivy).

Virginia creeper can have three leaves at times, and those can be hard to tell apart- especially if you’ve got that and poison ivy growing in the same area. If you’re ever not sure whether something is poison ivy or virginia creeper, look along the vine and you’ll generally be able to spot the additional 1-2 leaves in places if it is virginia creeper.
posted by wondermouse at 12:54 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

You haven't lived until you were an 8-year-old Connecticut kid who one day, after years of not being bothered, discovered an extreme sensitivity to poison ivy. I had a very painful rash over 95% of my body, including places you would really rather not have one, if you had to have one at all. I should knock on wood, but out here in WA I have never encountered its cousin poison oak, though I'm sure it's around.

Nettles, which are everywhere out here, are my current rash-inducing nemesis.
posted by maxwelton at 1:15 PM on February 4, 2023

I got 36/55. I'm never going outside again without a spacesuit.
posted by Foosnark at 1:18 PM on February 4, 2023

I was 40+ years old and a lover of frequent walks in the woods before I learned "hairy climbing vine" also means poison ivy. Thankfully I didn't learn this the hard way! Why don't people mention that part?!
posted by Gable Oak at 1:18 PM on February 4, 2023

"Hairy rope? Don't be a dope" is the lesser known follow-up to "Leaves of three, let it be".
posted by mollweide at 1:51 PM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Not bad - 50/55, and I only misidentified non-poison ivy plants. As someone upthread said, better a false positive....

And I'll say something else: jjj606's comment "poison ivy has a longer stem on the middle of the three leaves" was a huge helper! The ones I misidentified all had that longer middle stem as well as somewhat poison ivy-ish leaves.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:46 PM on February 4, 2023

52/55. I don't know that we have wild sarsparilla in the southeast--I don't recognize it, so I followed my "probably poison ivy" rule for those. Most of the others, I knew "that's clearly strawberry/creeper/dewberry".

I've had so many severe poison ivy exposures over the years from being a kid in the woods to being an ecologist that the rash I get is now almost unbearably gross. Folks bragging about not getting it: severity of reaction increases with exposure.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:47 PM on February 4, 2023

A few years ago I was working on a "farm" (really more a half-assed hobby of the woman running the place, but another story for another time) in the NC mountains. We had some Scottish Highlander cows, who tend to consider barbed wire a laughable minor inconvenience, but we had to at least make an effort to maintain a fence. A couple of times I was out in the woods with a coworker repairing said fence, and those woods were absolutely filled with poison ivy. We wore long jeans and long sleeve shirts (with rubber bands around wrists and ankles), long socks, boots, and heavy work gloves the whole time; we tried to be as careful as we could and both of us carefully undressed and showered after getting home. Even so, I'm amazed that I didn't get any rash - especially since my coworker did. I still wonder how I got so lucky. I'm not interesting in experimenting to see if I'm actually immune, though!
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:02 PM on February 4, 2023

55/55, which is good news given that I am employed to teach (among other things) field botany - but also have lived in places where poison ivy is abundant for my entire life, so I'm benefitting from being able to recognize it the same way you recognize the faces of your neighbors.

I am also, I suppose, cheating - I share this quiz with my students, so I've certainly clicked through these specific images before at some point in the past.

Here is another one I use that may satisfy those of you looking for more explanation of how to tell that the not-poison-ivy things are not poison ivy.

jjj606 has it - look for the longer stem in the middle leaflet, and the asymmetry in the side leaflets (the middle vein isn't centered). Poison ivy also doesn't have as many teeth along the edge of the leaf, and not as evenly, as some of the other three-leaflet suspects.

Also just wanted to highlight that this is a quiz from Rosemary Mosco of the comic Bird and Moon, and the whole website will delight any of you that haven't encountered her work before. I got you all this Valentine.
posted by erolls at 4:14 PM on February 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

46/55 I know this plant. I am so sensitive to it, I instinctively don't eat cashews, do eat mangoes, do eat pistashios, these other foods contain varying amounts of the active ingredient in poison ivy.
posted by Oyéah at 6:08 PM on February 4, 2023

Nettles, which are everywhere out here, are my current rash-inducing nemesis.

You can cook them and eat them as a leafy green (before they bolt) and they are delicious. I never feel bad about eating nettles.
posted by aniola at 6:10 PM on February 4, 2023

Good source of calcium, too.
posted by aniola at 6:10 PM on February 4, 2023

Wait a MANGO fruit has the same irritant as poison ivy??

Mostly in the skin of mangoes. The first time I ever had a freshly prepared mango I horrified my host by popping a slice into my mouth, skin and all. I was fine- I've also never gotten poison oak despite being around it frequently in my youth.
posted by oneirodynia at 8:16 PM on February 4, 2023

At the first house I bought, the vine had run rampant for decades, and getting rid of it took all summer because I was adamant about avoiding herbicide as much as possible. The next year after I cleaned up the forest, I was rewarded with a glorious surprise crop of lady slipper orchids!

Lady Slipper orchids are known to cause a poison Ivy like rash, Miss Cellania!

I wouldn’t say this is a classic case of Müllerian mimicry unless the foliage resembles poison ivy (does it, in your experience?), but it’s too much for coincidence that two plants with similar modes of poisoning would be hanging out together like that.

It seems to me there would be a synergy in it, because if some animal ran afoul of one in a habitat where both were intermingled it wouldn’t be able to dptell which one poisoned it, and then if it ran into the one which hadn’t poisoned it by itself in another it would tend to avoid that one too, so that poison ivy and slippers are kind of sharing the work. Just like classical Müllerian mimicry, in other words, but in poisoning symptoms rather than appearance.

And of course all the other plants that look like poison ivy but aren’t poisonous are probably Batesian mimics.
posted by jamjam at 12:52 AM on February 5, 2023

Oh my dog! Is this the new "I am not a robot" quizz?
posted by mightshould at 2:08 AM on February 5, 2023

53/55 and bitter I got two wrong.

I have a friendly enough relationship to poison ivy and I'd better because we have a ton of it.

It's native, controls erosion, feeds birds, grows in inhospitable areas. Good fall color some years. I only pull (long pants, long sleeves, gloves) in managed garden areas and only for half an hour at a time before going in for a lukewarm shower and a full change of clothing. It comes out easily after rain and it's shallowly rooted and somewhat satisfying to feel it pop pop pop out of the ground as you pull.

My luck will run out eventually but it's held steady for ten years.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:57 AM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

picking leaves to use as toilet paper.

This is simply never a good idea and I’m really glad I grew up far enough from reliable deciduous foliage that I never really heard it until I was old enough to know better.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:56 AM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re mango: This is a good PSA. A lot of people think they have a mango allergy, when it’s far more common to just not be aware that you really do need to peel them properly, especially the smaller yellow ones.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:00 AM on February 5, 2023

51/55, and I argue that at least a couple were because they were too focused on the juvenile leaves so I didn't have any surrounding context of the rest of the plant.

Was surprised not to see any box elder in the look-alikes section, though - the young leaves look basically identical to poison ivy, but the leaf clusters branch off the vine opposite each other and not alternatingly.
posted by jferg at 6:48 AM on February 5, 2023

In western Oregon there's no poison ivy but poison oak is abundant. Every few years I have to pull a bunch of it. It's hard to get the whole root. When I realize I have a lot of it, I put on an old long sleeve shirt (perhaps I go get one at a thrift store) and put on long rubber gloves covering the shirt cuffs. I make a mental note to not touch anything, esp. my face. When I'm done, the gloves and shirt go straight into the trash. I'll have a trash receptacle ready for this. Then I go inside and wash with Technu.
posted by neuron at 11:43 AM on February 5, 2023

OK now do poison hemlock. There are way too many things that look like it, including carrots.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 1:10 PM on February 5, 2023

My favourite entry in the test was the clover, since it does have three leaves but is otherwise completely unlike poison ivy.
posted by RobotHero at 2:11 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

OK now do poison hemlock. There are way too many things that look like it, including carrots.

Which is why I diligently avoid carrots and, by association, all other vegetables. I'll stick with nice safe bacon, thanks!
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:54 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Lady Slipper orchids are known to cause a poison Ivy like rash, Miss Cellania!

I wouldn’t say this is a classic case of Müllerian mimicry unless the foliage resembles poison ivy (does it, in your experience?), but it’s too much for coincidence that two plants with similar modes of poisoning would be hanging out together like that.

Well, I didn't pick the orchids. I assumed that removing the foot or so of pine needles and poison ivy roots allowed them to thrive again. I can't recall what they looked like except for the blooms, since it was almost 30 years ago.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:03 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a lifelong West Coaster who has never seen poison ivy (or several of these other plants) I feel okay about 47/55.--posted by oneirodynia

Same and I got 46/55. I think poison ivy has enough similarities to poison oak to make it easier to identify if you know poison oak, though poison ivy seems to be trickier with different leaf edge styles.

There's so much poison oak along side the trails here that I have (not seriously) suspected that rangers are purposely planting it to make sure hikers stay on the trails.
posted by eye of newt at 11:46 AM on February 6, 2023

Also a note on sensitivity--I think it is like an allergy: you can develop the allergy after repeated exposures. I had a friend who was convinced that poison oak didn't affect him at all and would take leaves and rub them on his face to prove the point. Then, one day, his body decided "no more of this stuff!" and his face swelled up enough that his eyes were blocked by swelling and he couldn't see. So be careful!
posted by eye of newt at 11:50 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

this was a very good reminder that I forgot what that dastardly weed looked like. Hopefully I won't see it again!
posted by nostradamnit at 2:10 PM on February 6, 2023

51/55 which I blame on sheer leaf-fatigue.
posted by gorbichov at 10:52 AM on February 7, 2023