Recently, I noticed that some users tag museum specimens as “cultivated/captive,” which I believe is incorrect—or at least not accurate. For example, many kakapo specimens preserved in European museums are tagged as “captive.” As far as I know, some ancient Maori people kept kakapos as pets, but the only European scientist known to have owned a pet kakapo was George Gray. Therefore, most European specimens must have been caught in the wild.
I think they should be tagged as “no recent evidence” (more than 100 years), “date inaccurate” and “location inaccurate” (should be when and where it was collected).
Marking them as “captive” but without “no recent evidence,” “date inaccurate,” and “location inaccurate” is effectively suggesting that “there is a captive kakapo in modern Europe”, which is very misleading.
I agree completely with your assessment. museum material is ineligible for research grade (aside from material that has an iNaturalist observation of its original collection point and appearance!) precisely because the locality and date information will be completely off from the wild population, not because it originated from domesticated material.
it is very common to see incorrect DQA input from people who either misunderstand the rules, don’t care by what means a record is made Casual-grade, or (in different cases than this one) sometimes were working on their identification queue before a certain assessment or annotation became available.
The captive/cultivated annotation is intended to reflect whether or not the organism was in a captive state at the date/location of the observation. This is a common area of confusion, but here is some accurate info, as far as I understand:
Plants physically planted by humans in any location are considered captive/cultivated. This includes garden plants, trees planted during restoration activities, etc. Herbarium specimens would be considered captive as well.
Animals captive can be domesticated, and can also be wild animals that are held captive by humans, such as fish at a fish market or animals at a rehab center, or museum specimens in your instances.
Most of the above can be considered wild, though, if the date, time, and location of the observation are updated to reflect where the organism was collected. You can think of this as the data accurately representing whether the animal was in a wild state at the date/location indicated in the observation.
I hope this helps your understanding. The tag doesn’t necessarily indicate domestication, but rather indicates whether or not that particular organism is wild (and not captive) at the observation place and time.
I don’t understand why all herbarium specimens would be considered captive. If I take a few photos of a naturally occurring plant before collecting a specimen (with a permit) for the herbarium are the photos considered wild but the specimen captive? I’d have thought that they’d both be wild
…unless its iNaturalist data reflect the date and location where the collection was originally made (and the organism did not live in captivity significantly past that date before it was killed).
iNaturalist discourages making photographs of museum specimens into iNaturalist observations for many reasons, including copyright, and potential duplication with the museum’s specimen record in GBIF.
But such observations are occasionally posted, and can become research grade under the conditions above. People should not assume that any museum specimen seen on iNaturalist must become Casual grade - check the details first. And people posting such observations (if absolutely necessary) should include a clarifying note or comment indicating exactly what the date and location are representing.
I largely agree with @natemarchessault - If the observation of a preserved specimen has the date and time the observer indeed saw the preserved specimen, then those are data correct and shouldn’t be downvoted in the DQA. Marking observations of these preserved specimens as captive is reasonable as the (deceased, preserved) specimen is not at a time/location of its choosing, but because of human intention.
If the observer is someone who collected the specimen and is attempting to create an observation for where they first encountered it in the wild, but they have incorrectly entered that data (like the location is in a museum/herbarium), then downvoting location or date could be appropriate, though I’d leave a comment explaining the vote.
If the words used here were wild/non-wild, I would agree with @natemarchessault . But the words used here are wild/cultivated/captive. I don’t think a specimen can be described as “captive”.
Herbarium specimens are not captive, unless the plant when it was alive was grown in a greenhouse or intentionally planted by a person–this is almost never the case (but could be). If the plant (or animal) was growing/living on it’s own accord when it was collected, it is not captive.
yes, that is what I meant by observation of its original collection point… though maybe mentioning original appearance as well defines it too strictly.
I have collected a substantial number of specimens now housed at the herbarium of the Morton Arboretum (and a handful that belong to the Field Museum) that do not have iNaturalist observations associated… but do have all the minimally required data, and certainly I could validly “convert” those data into an iNaturalist upload. I guess this is ultimately the same point as made by @0x4372616967 and @pfau_tarleton.
All jargon has this problem, which is why we develop glossaries to define what we mean by words in a context sensitive way, independent of their etymology and cultural overloading and changes over time.
If I trap an animal and remove it from the natural habitat it was born and raised in to keep it captive in some other place, it’s not automatically ‘Not Wild’ either - it’s still a wild animal unless I can domesticate it. But I do agree that an organism which is not wild would usually be correctly categorised as ‘Captive’ in inat jargon.
I agree with what several others have said that one should only mark another person’s observation as “captive/cultivated” if they are absolutely certain that the observation does not represent the time and place of capture of a wild organism. As someone who works mainly with very small insects, there are numerous species for which the only research grade observations are of pinned specimens in collections, often because they can only be definitively identified by dissecting a dead specimen under a microscope or looking at microscopic features that are hidden from view when alive. As long as the observer enters the date and location of original capture, these should be treated the same as live photos would be. A perennial challenge when dealing with these groups is that misinformed users often see a pinned specimen and think “that’s dead and in a collection” so they mark it as captive and dead. If it was alive when collected, and the date represents the time when it was found, it should be annotated as alive and wild. The annotations in this case aren’t meant to describe the picture; they’re meant to describe the observation. And whether the picture is of the organism alive in situ or dead and preserved 10 years later, it was still found alive and wild at the location and date indicated.
I make it a personal habit to go through the various “casual” observations of insects in my region, and I frequently find interesting records that overzealous annotators sent to Casual purgatory. My personal opinion is that we should err on the side of only annotating someone else’s observations as captive if we’re absolutely sure- a kakapo in Europe is a good example of a safe bet. Or an exotic plant sitting in a pot in a Home Depot garden center, or a pet cat with a collar sitting on an armchair. But something like a pinned beetle submitted at a location where the beetle might occur naturally, or an exotic plant that might or might not be a volunteer? I would never presume to know enough to mark someone else’s observation as “captive” in these cases without further information. And I’d rather have an occasional cultivated organism erroneously make it to RG because we were unsure of its origins than have an occasional valid record erroneously relegated to Casual because someone made assumptions about it.
An example of when it could be: a putative new species is found in the wild in a vegetative stage, without any flowers or fruits. The botanist collects the specimen alive, transplants it to a botanic garden to wait for it to flower, and then writes the species description once it flowers. This situation is not too unusual, for example, in Araceae.
But that was my point - there’s no use haggling over alternate definitions of words, or saying “it would be better if we used a different one”, because they are all troublesome in that way. It’s a kind of fundamental feature of the sophistication of English.
What’s important is defining the consensus for what each of these terms of art mean in this space and giving good guidance for their use.