No this is absolutely on topic and it's true.
I and many other people legitimately grew up with the idea that "we've already discovered/studied everything" in most areas of the world and only certain environments, like the Amazon rainforest or the bottom of the ocean, have "undiscovered" and unresearched things. It's the way the whole discipline of the natural sciences is presented to you as a kid, like we're no longer in the Age Of Discovering Things.
I'm starting to get really alarmed by how badly high school biology needs disclaimers that everything in it is extremely oversimplified, because I think concepts as they are taught in school end up being the general public's entire understanding of what exists and CAN exist, and it's hard to introduce the idea that there is much, MUCH more out there.
So...biomes. Habitats. Most people learn that there are basic categories of environment like wetland, forest, desert, grassland, tundra, and that's it. But what they DON'T learn is that there are actually hundreds of what the public understands as "biomes." Oak savannas. Limestone barrens. North America has so many open woodland and wetland types it absolutely boggles the mind.
And with canebrakes specifically, there's a very simple reason they're unknown and unresearched—they don't fall under any existing categories. They're not wetlands. They're not forests. They're canebrakes. Our conservation efforts, our Google searches, our sorting and categorizing of information, it's all according to categories that don't actually reflect what nature is like.
A similar thing is happening with oak savannas, I think.
Isn't this strange? That we made categories like "wetland" "prairie" and "forest," and their inaccuracy and incompleteness hasn't just decreased our awareness of canebrakes, oak savannas, and limestone barrens—it's literally helped erase those things from existence (thankfully they're not quite gone).
I talk a lot about the importance of understanding nature as something that can never be fully defined or placed in boxes. It's not just a philosophical experiment, it's real—categorization in biology has the power to destroy.
How do you define a canebrake if your existing understanding allows only for forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts? What kind of biome is an environment where the dominant plant life is bamboo? The bamboo itself is weird; it's a gigantic woody grass, evergreen, growing in dense monotypic stands of tightly packed canes. Maybe a canebrake is a grassland, because bamboo is a grass...but if that grass is woody and 30-40 feet tall, maybe it's more like a tree. Wait, "tree" isn't a monophyletic group. Maybe a bamboo is a tree and grass at the same time.
There's no way to "solve" it. There's always a secret third thing.
