Are culture-based observations considered 'wild'?

i think there’s one other case that may be relevant to this discussion. if you took, say, a swab of a surface and then grew out the microbes in the lab, i think i would still call that wild (assuming the surface is not some sort of thing that doesn’t exist outside of a lab or something like that), though i would assign the location as the place where the collection took place, not where the microbes were grown out. in this situation, although you cultured the organisms, you did so to make them observable at human scale. i think that’s no different than, say running PCR before a nucleic acid sequencing or making a spore print in a controlled environment.

1 Like