In entomology it is common to catch something alive and kill it to identify it and photograph it. Should I annotate this as dead or alive? I reckon alive, as that is the condition of the creature in the habitat on the day I found it, so contributes to phenology etc. But there are aspects of iNaturalist where what seems correct to me doesn’t match the consensus, so I thought I better check.
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Observaion=interaction, caught insect was alive, so alive it is.
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Thanks. I’ll get annotating.
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The annotation should reflect the time and place you associate with the specimen. Eg if you use the time and place of original collection, it is Alive.
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This is a fascinating question - I would have assumed the opposite as one of the reasons put forward for dead/alive was to allow people to avoid photos of dead wildlife, e.g. when exploring the site with kids. However, as the annotations are little used it isn’t a reliable filter for protecting sensitive eyes.
Quite a few of the photos of dead animals that I come across are snakes who have quite possibly been killed at the time of observation, but more as a blanket response to a snake than for id purposes. & not necessarily by the observer themselves… I have been marking these ‘dead’.
But for your use case @jhbratton , I agree it makes more sense for the recording of the natural history. Thank you for bringing it up and to everyone for explaining!
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