Thank you for those articles! I would guess they have records of the animals tagged, their history, and their origins, but I don’t know if those records are accessible to us.
I love that in North America I can submit band numbers on any bird I see and almost always get information back on the bird, its tagging location, and wherever it’s been recaptured at any point. Same with marine mammals and several others. But there are other species here whose marks aren’t centrally managed or are in private or local programs, or the info isn’t shared with random observers like myself, and I don’t know what the case is for the tuatara.
That’s a good way of looking at it - if it’s just preserving the area in its natural state against humans damaging it, even if it’s with preserving a particular species in mind, then that ought to be presumed as wild.
One could argure that the animals in a zoo enclosure are “free to move around within the confines” of that enclosure, but at that point we’re playing semantical games.
I think there’s a difference between zoo and wild reintroduction area that goes beyond size, and involves care, intent, results, etc. And like the actual island as an ecological island versus an ecological island that is separated by a fence, or on a peninsula, etc. (note this is used as a technical term in NZ and Australia in their management of wild areas and ecology), it has to do with intent and management within those confines.
In the US, that means every single National Park is not wild, nor any of the other wild areas managed by BLM, state, or federal government. All of them are managed, sometimes quite intensely. Removal of invasives, management of wild populations, tracking, tagging, vaccination and sterilization, treatment of wild animals, even some feeding of some populations, maintaining access and trails, monitoring human use, etc. etc. etc. Not that we’re going to have any park service employees anymore, but at least until recently, there is a LOT of management going on in any wild space that is preserved for any reason.
Do you think whether an area is wild is then irrelevant to whether something be marked captive or not, or that all observations within a park or preserve should be marked captive? There would be next to zero non-casual/captive observations from North America or Europe, in that case, or much of the rest of the world, for that matter.
Yes, good question, and several people have answered with what my take is on this. The naturally reproduced offspring of the released tuatara are wild but the originally released tuatara are not. The trick is telling them apart, but then that’s exactly analogous to observing a lot of plant species in cities. Sometimes it’s clear that they’ve been planted (not wild), sometimes it’s clear that they grew up from a naturally dispersed seed (wild), and often it’s unclear whether they were planted or not.
In ambiguous situations, I use the observation field “Is it wild?” and set it to “Maybe”. That doesn’t map onto iNaturalist’s captive/cultivated category though, and so I usually also leave it set to wild when this is ambiguous, as it at least then shows up on the default Identify page and can reach “Research Grade”.
I have said before that we have seen The End of Nature. Nothing is wild anymore.
But then again, no. I take that back. Eco-anarchist writer known as Sever reminds us, “The wild is everywhere, ceaselessly pushing back; all it needs from us is cracks.”
True, although that means that they were wild on Takapourewa before they were picked up and moved by people. Once moved by people they’re not wild at their new location.
If I dig up a wild plant on the edge of a reserve and plant it in my garden, it’s not wild in my garden.
When the translocated tuatara breed, their offspring become newly wild in the new location. That’s like if that plant I moved set seed and its seedlings starting growing in my garden. They’re the first wild generation of that species at the location.
In iNat, wild and captive have definitions that are a bit unintuitive (at least they were to me when starting out), in most cases wild or captive/cultivated (for iNat purposes) hinges on whether the organism got to where it was observed by its own agency or a human took it there, more so than whether the animal is able to move around or originated from a wild population (as oppose to bred in captivity).
I guess that’s half the reason I’m unclear on the best way to treat this.
In the United States, it is not uncommon for problematic wild animals (for example bears which are raiding garbage cans) to be captured and relocated to an area where they are less likely to interfere with the human population. They do not make the move of their volition, of course. It is absurd to say that having once been relocated by human agency, they forever lose their status as wild animals.
This seems impossible to track in most cases, either. We have a special case with the tuatara since they are in an ecological island now, but with the vast majority of wildlife relocations, the next person encountering them would have no idea they’d ever been moved by a human. This also means every animal that had ever been in rehab was now captive. And of course I expect helping a turtle across the road, or the bug that hitched a ride on a windshield is not meant to count but they are human-assisted.
I understand this to an extent; for example, bird records committees will have endless debates on whether a bird is a natural vagrant or was helped along by humans (in the cases of ship-assist for example), but in this case, it’s because birding is something of a competition, and not about the animal’s status per se.
But the definition used by iNaturalist regarding human assistance sounds far more like the difference between an introduced/reintroduced population and current/historic range, rather than the difference between captive and wild.
Not exactly, as introduced vs native is about a population, rather than an individual. This difference has been discussed in abundance here and I don’t think it’s worth spending more time discussing it.
In any case I don’t think you could automatically consider a relocated animal captive by that definition, since it’s unlikely to remain at the place it was relocated to for you to observe it, if any time has passed. Unlike plants, animals move around.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but I thought it worth the discussion because, in this case, the vast majority of observations of tuatara in iNat belong in this group. They have been trapped and removed to an enclosure where most of them are unmanaged, where some of the current population presumably was born, but where many of animals that people are likely to encounter (and thus create an observation of) may be in equivalent conditions to a zoo.
It is a two-part definition. It is not just that a human put it there, but also that its presence at the time it is observed is anthropogenic, and that is the key part meaning that once an animal is able to choose to go elsewhere then it is not captive.
So rehab releases and relocations and reintroductions, once out of human hands, are explicitly excluded by the “then” part of the “then and there” clause.
The tuatara are still a special case that is difficult to answer, because of the nature of the particular preserve. They are out of human hands, but they come up against human barriers. And knowing there is a smaller preserve-within-a-preserve also complicates things. I feel that it definitely a different case than an observation of a tuatara in an actual zoo exhibit, but how different?
But practically I agree with what was said – it also probably doesn’t matter in this case in terms of Research Grade, because anyone researching tuataras is going to know what’s up with Zealandia anyway and can decide how that data should be used.
That is an unrealistic definition of “captive,” and it simply isn’t useful in many cases. Anything caught in a dredge or a plankton net and brought to the surface becomes a non-wild animal. Fish brought to shore in a seine or a gill net or by hook and line - not wild. Similarly, things dug up from underground and then photographed on the surface - not wild.
To address that they specify later on the page in examples that a snake in the hand (if you mark the observation as where you picked it up) would still be marked wild because even though you intended it to be in your hand, it was in the time and place the snake intended to be.