Are culture-based observations considered 'wild'?

personally, i would classify the released fungus / spores as captive/cultivated, since they were cultured by a human and released into the environment by a human.

but i would classify the culture as wild at the location and date of collection. as noted earlier, the culture is just a process/method to make the wild organism observable at a human scale. this is no different from observations of organisms based on any of these other processes:

  • a specimen that taken in the field but prepped and photographed at another location
  • a photo that was taken in the field but blown up or otherwise processed at home to reveal features that weren’t observable in the field
  • a photo from a night/game cam that was taken in the field but reviewed and selected at a different time and location
  • a bat call that was taken in the field and processed at home into a spectrogram
  • a spore print taken at home from a mushroom collected in the field
  • DNA that was collected in the field but processed back in a lab

at the end of the day, jameskdouch’s culture would be evidence that an organism existed in the wild at a particular time and place (of collection), just like any of those items noted above. i think the key is to document the process thoroughly to establish sort of a chain of custody as best as you can.

even then, i’m sure some will still disagree with how to classify the observation (as wild or not). here’s another topic that i think shows how much disagreement there is on an analogous subject: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/animals-in-temporary-captivity/7072. and in this topic, i doubt you’ll find consensus either. so i think just classify it the way you think is right, and don’t be too upset if others disagree. that’s why the captive/wild DQA mechanism is a voting system, i suppose.

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