A Question About Fish Handling on iNaturalist

[AdamWargon]

You have to love the iNat community. Leave it to a group of iNatters to start unpacking the nuances! When the thread started with a valid concern:

@IlaFrance

one thing has long troubled me is the widespread posting of photographs of dying or dead fish being held out of the water

First, James pointed out:

@jnstuart

I don’t believe all fish that are photo’d out of water are dead or dying. Even fish researchers will photo fish they’ve collected by netting or electrofishing and return them to water. It can be done with little or no harm to the fish.

Then, Dan added the perspective of making observations of other people’s catches:

@dlevitis

I’ve seen many observations of fish caught by recreational fisherpeople who were not the observer

Dan reminded me of this thread:

@AdamWargon

you can build awareness of iNat, in this fishing population, in many different ways . . . You could volunteer at fishing tournaments

While it can be tough to look at, from a data perspective, one problem is not that we have too many observations of dying or dead fish, but rather that we have too few of them to build an accurate picture of aquatic biodiversity!