Yes, but by itself, before it started getting human attention it’s growing on its own and wasn’t meant to be there by human.
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I agree with melodi_96 on this one. In my opinion, something is ‘captive’ if its existence in that time/place is the result of human intention. Assuming humans didn’t do anything to deliberately make that cherry seedling sprout, the fact that it’s in a controlled environment doesn’t make it non-wild. A spider living inside a house is in an environment even more artificial than a garden, but no one would suggest that a house spider is captive/cultivated. I think it’s the intentionality behind means of establishment that matters, not the controlledness of the environment.
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yes, the phenology and distribution / population count might be unrepresentative, but i think that’s just where the detailed notes are important to explain what’s going on in your observation. i think it’s often true that whenever you try to make microorganisms observable at human scale, you get distortions of how the organisms actually existed in nature – because you’ll have to stain them, put them under unnatural light conditions, etc. but i think in the spirit of iNaturalist, where the primary point is to connect people to nature, it’s more important to encourage any observations of natural microorganisms using whatever methods / processes are available, rather than to relegate these kinds of observations to a dark corner of the platform.
for me, the difference with the spider is that it probably arrived into the controlled environment on its own. i’m fine with you and melodi_96 calling the hypothetical baby cherry wild or non-wild. i don’t think that sort of classification is really that important in the grand scheme of things.
here’s a thinker: what would you call a baby elephant that was conceived naturally in a zoo and raised in a zoo? (you don’t actually have to respond to this, but it’s just something to mull over.)
Not quite sure how I ended up in non-wild for culturing since I said it would depend on the intent of the observer. But anyway… there are caveats to any classification rules. What are you trying accomplish? Are spores present and what are they? Or what organisms are growing or thriving here now? iNat is a tool not a project. It can’t make all the decisions for you but it can provide a framework for many common questions. Spores and even some seeds can be problematic for certain questions.
If I wanted to know what fungus, bryophytes, or maybe even certain vascular plants are living in a location, rearing them in favorable conditions is a good start. But most spores and seeds fail. Are the rearing conditions so much more favorable than the habitat you collected in that the organism would never really grow there? I’d want to take care to only simulate conditions that can be found at the collection location for that kind of study.
If I’m asking “where do these spores go?” Sure, create the most favorable conditions you can (probably multiple types of favorable). The spores did get to the collection location naturally.
I think a few additional notes or annotation would satisfy most users of rearing records. Keeps everyone from wondering if this “wild” is getting outside the boundaries for their question.
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Some very good notes on a reared observation here - Genus Narina from Pringle Bay, 7196, South Africa on August 06, 2017 at 11:37 PM by magriet b. <h3>Ambush life in a tub</h3> <h4>6 Aug 2017:</h4> I collected an adult ambush bug with 10 eggs … · iNaturalist.ca
It’s still marked as wild, though.
If asked, I would say that the first adult was the subject of the observation. Looks wild to me.
All the rearing information is bonus after the initial observation. There is a chance the adult and eggs are not related unless I missed the note about seeing the laying of eggs. They’re probably related though.
“the phenology, and potentially the distribution, would be unrepresentative of the natural biology in cases of culture.”
But your record would be of an ungerminated spore in the place you collected it. So all you are showing is that spores get everywhere. You aren’t saying the fungus would ever have grown in that place, so phenology and habitat are irrelevant. Growing it on in a humid container is just an identification aid.
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My main concern with recording the spore would be, was it definitely from the place you claim or was it a subsequent contamination? But I guess mycologists have methods for dealing with that.
I have this observation of E. coli from a creek: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/38813135
As far as I know the only reliable way to detect the presence of E. coli in water is with a test like this, or it least it’s by far the easiest. It’s an interesting situation to think about since it is indirect evidence in multiple steps.
The coloured dots are a chemical in the gel reacting to the waste produced by the offspring of the original bacteria that were in the creek (each dot represents a colony which was theoretically produced from a single bacterium). My picture would have been taken about 24 hours after the water was collected from the creek.
E. coli occurs naturally in the guts of warm-blooded animals, and isn’t supposed to survive longer than 24 hours or so outside of conditions analagous to that (warm, humid, and dark). So the creek isn’t the natural habitat and those individual bacteria would have come from a human (this creek is known to have sewage contamination) or other mammal or bird.
And with all that I still think it should count as wild since I used the date and time of collecting the water sample, and am using it as evidence that the bacteria were occurring naturally in the creek at that time.
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“Not quite sure how I ended up in non-wild for culturing…”
Re-reading your previous post, I realise that I misinterpreted you. Sorry!
Thanks for taking the time to explain your reasoning.
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Where is the cutoff, though? If I have, say, cyanobacteria and ostracods in an ecosphere, which came from a known locality, but the ecosphere is several months old and might have developed differently during that time than the source waterway… to me that feels “captive” or “cultivated.” Even though, as @tallastro says, I cultured it for identification.
My ecospheres seem like they would be a gray area – I didn’t purposely choose which organisms to put in (they are whatever happened to activate out of the water and sand), but I did build the ecospheres on purpose, knowing stuff would grow in them.
In the case of bacterial culture, as with my ecospheres, there may be succession as the culture grows. In the days it takes for a bacterial culture to become visible, some taxa might have outcompeted and eliminated others.
Okay, so then I can put my ecosphere organisms up as wild, then?
if you look hard enough, you will always be able to find edge cases that are hard to fit into whatever classification system you have. if a tardigrade hitches a ride on a space capsule that stays up in a space for a week, and you observe it before the capsule descends back to earth, what do you record for the location and time? if you observe cells that have been created synthetically, is this life?
here’s what i would try to remember as i classify as wild vs cultivated:
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Good to know. I am trying to get at least one observation from every kingdom, and as I believe this to be Genus Oscillatoria, that adds Kingdom Bacteria.
I had a question on one of my observations:
A squirrel I presume planted the acorn. The seedling sprouted under a tree.
We moved the seedling a few yards to a place we want a new tree to grow.
Is the new tree wild or cultivated?
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After it was moved yes it is cultivated, we also got a small oak growing randomly and moved it (now it’s a big tree), so when it was growing in initial spot it was wild, but we, humans, decided where it should grow, benefiting it.
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Being cheeky here again - what’s wrong with organisms found on the Culture planets/Orbitals? Some may recognise the reference to Iain M. Banks Culture Science Fiction books.
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