The title explains it well enough. I collected a caterpillar with intent to rear it to adulthood to confirm species, as it is almost assuredly an uncommon species with very few larval images. From what I have gleaned from here, best practice is as followed for reared insects:
Initial post in-situ=wild, labeled with location and time
Any posts of the organism beyond this should be marked casual but linked somehow to the original post to preserve the body of evidence. (Should date and time be accurate to the new observation or the original?)
Now, I had a single parasitoid wasp cocoon appear on my caterpillar today, and wanted to know whether it should be marked as casual or wild, and how I should list the location/date.
Argument for wild: I had no idea this larva was inside my caterpillar, this is the first time I am observing it. The observation is objectively important to science as I cannot find many notes in literature of parasitism with this exact species. The future observations when the wasp itself emerges should be casual, so having one observation in the line as wild might be appropriate?
Argument for casual: The caterpillar’s living conditions have been fundamentally altered for more than two weeks, including a switch in diet (from one oak species to another, both from the same area. Hasn’t eaten third oak species from different area). The caterpillar may not have survived this long, or the wasp could have developed faster.
Personally, I don’t use “casual” at all. Anything I rear gets its own observation, separate from the original one associated with the collection, with cross-referenced links. I can see the argument for using “casual” if there is reason to believe that development time was substantially altered from the natural condition (e.g., if a rearing container was refrigerated for part of the winter and then brought to room temperature well before spring). But I don’t like the way “casual” observations are excluded from search results, and my personal preference is to be able to easily find all observations of a given species; it is then easy to take a look at any observations that seem phenologically unusual and check whether they were reared under unnatural conditions.
The wasp is wild for biological recording purposes. The question is, was it in the caterpillar when you collected it? In which case, its locality is where you took the caterpillar, but the problem then is you have no photo of it at that time. In most biological recording systems you would record it as larva at the place and date you took the caterpillar and show the emerged adult as evidence of the species. But iNaturalist doesn’t like the record to differ from the photo. Or has the caterpillar been parasitised since you brought it home? In which case it is a wild record from your home but there is the issue you mention - that the timing of emergence may have been influenced by the home conditions.
It’s interesting that you say that with such confidence when the iNat policy does not give guidance about this particular case. As long as the location data are edited to show the collection site, I see no reason not to treat the caterpillar as wild, and valuable data on timing of pupation and adult emergence would be lost if everyone marked such observations as “captive.” Treating the parasitoid differently from the caterpillar makes no sense to me.
There have been plenty of posts about rearing insects on the forum, and the recommended guidance is that it is fine to have a wild observation at the collection location/date/time from a picture off site as long as the organism has not changed substantially (e.g., it has become a different life stage, etc.). So photos of a caterpillar taken after collection could generally be wild (with the observation at the location/date/time of collection) until it pupates. Posting an observation of a pupa created in captivity at the location/date/time of the original collection would inaccurately represent the observer’s experience and make phenology data incorrect.
There are a lot of previous threads on insects raised in captivity with extensive discussion, so it would be best to focus the discussion here on the original question about the parasitoid, which is an interesting one I can’t remember a thread about.
My personal thought would be that the parasitoid could be a wild observation since you didn’t intend it to be there. I agree that, if there’s something about the captivity that seriously changed the timing/development of the host caterpillar (like temperature, making it emerge in winter, etc.), then the parasitoid observation should probably be captive, as its life stage is likely not representative of what it would have been in the wild. Based on the specific description of the scenario here, I don’t see anything that seems to far off, so I’d interpret it as wild, but maybe someone else who knows more about caterpillars could give a reason why that wouldn’t be the case.
That said, the observation should be at the location/date/time where you actually observed it, which is wherever you are rearing the caterpillar - this is because of the fundamental definition of an observation, which is based on the observing user’s experience. Since you didn’t observe the parasitoid at the location/date/time of the caterpillar’s collection, the location/date/time shouldn’t be there. I would just add a note in the description which links to the original observation of the caterpillar at the collection site or use one of the observation fields for linked observations (or both).
I’m not sure I agree with this 100% of the time. What comes to mind are microscopy observations- I observed zero rotifers when I scooped up the pond water, but I still place the observation point in the pond rather than in my living room where I used the microscope to see them. I could see an argument that just as the duckweed I collected was later observed to have rotifers in it, the caterpillar they collected was later observed to have parasitoids in it. Asking for one of those to move the location to where the parasitoid was first spotted but leave the other one at the location where the duckweed was scooped seems inconsistent. Unless we should be putting all our microscopy observations as captive in our houses/labs, but that seems like it would eliminate every RG rotifer observation on the whole of iNat if it were practiced. Or is this another intentionality question- I intended to look for rotifers in the pond water, so I need to also have the intention of looking for parasitoids in the caterpillar when I collect it in order for the original location of collection to stand? (The intentionality thing always messes with my head when I’m looking at water samples… like I collected the water to look for diatoms, but there’s also a water treader bug in there when I get home- is she a “hitchhiker” since I didn’t deliberately scoop the water looking for that taxon? I personally say “no”, because I was collecting a sample with the intent to look for organisms, and it’s more consistent to call them all deliberate catches by default. On the same lines though, I understand that a parasitoid is probably what I’m collecting when I grab a caterpillar, because more than half the caterpillars I rear come out parasitized. So I wouldn’t call a parasitoid a hitchhiker observed at my house any more than a surprise microorganism I wasn’t explicitly expecting in a water sample.)
Here’s a modest proposal that should help everyone: observers who know how abundant parasitoids are and see themselves as collecting parasitoids when they catch a caterpillar count theirs at the location of capture, but observers who actually expect to get moths out of their caterpillars have to count their parasitoids as hitchhikers and place the location markers in their houses.
I said the same thing that pretty much every one else does: at the moment of collection the caterpillar is wild, so if you add an observation of it with the time/date/place of collection that can be wild, but anything beyond that, is not. (For example an observation when the caterpillar has changed to a pupa while under the care of a human.) The parasitoid is maybe more open to debate, but seems to me most similar to the case of “fly on a zebra in a zoo” from the guidelines, where the zebra is captive, but the fly is wild.
I specifically answered to your post though to point out that
I don’t like the way “casual” observations are excluded from search results
is not a valid reason to mark an organism as wild when it should be marked as captive according to policy
This I agree with. My personal line is one week. Anything I do to speed up / slow down / alter development within the first 7 days of capturing a caterpillar isn’t going to have an impact on phenology data beyond a day or two, so I call them wild if I photograph them at home within the first few days. Controversially, I keep the same 7 day window even if they pupate in that time. I know the popular advice on the forum is “once it changes life stage you make any further observations captive”, but as this isn’t written as an official guideline (as far as I know), I don’t follow it. If I catch a larva today and it pupates tonight, that larva was going to pupate tonight one way or another. It’s not going to mess with any phenology data to add photos of the pupa at that point. Once I’ve had it for over a week though, its development might have been altered to the point that its phenology is impacted. But again, this depends on the species and the situation. I think “use your best judgement” is key.
Make the observation with the date and location from where you collected the caterpillar. If it’s safe to assume the wasp was present at the time but just not visible, then you could include photos from a later date/location and specify the situation in the comments. In this case the wasp is wild.
Make the observation with the date and location where you found the cocoon (your house some days later I assume). In this case it is not wild.
Different people will have different preferences but I don’t think one option is worse than the other as long as sufficient clarification is provided in the notes. Some compromise between these (e.g. date of when you found the cocoon but location of where you found the caterpillar) doesn’t accurately represent the situation in my mind. The wasp was not in fact at that location at that time.
Option 1 could mess with phenology data if it was a larva or egg on collection and is now a cocoon; so I might avoid filling out the life stage annotation if you go with that option.
Interesting, to me this doesn’t seem too dissimilar to e.g. an indoor environment allowing an arthropod to be active in a winter it would normally be dormant for, and those seem to be universally accepted as wild here. (Or are there cases where a weed in a flower bed has a strange phenology due to getting water in a normally dry season? That would be a better metaphor, but I’m embarrassingly clueless about that sort of thing)
Either way, I think the most important thing is that whatever you do you include as much information as you can in the observation (location and date of collection of the original caterpillar, link to said observation, etc…)
The solution to the phenology problem is a hybrid of those two options: the parasitoid observation should have the original collection location, but the actual date on which it was observed.
It certainly has not been my experience that “pretty much every one else” treats observations like this as casual. I have seen plenty of examples of both.
You’re acting as if iNat has a very clear policy about this, but the only thing that’s clear to me from the article you linked to is that the people who wrote it did not consider situations where people are making ongoing observations about caterpillars collected in the wild, and their parasitoids. I was asked for my opinion, as someone who makes extensive use of iNat data in scientific papers, what approach would be more useful to me, and I gave my answer and explained why. If all observations of reared parasitoids were marked “casual,” we would be losing a ton of valuable data on geographic distribution.
When professional biologists rear specimens to adult in captivity and deposit those specimens in a museum collection, they do not get marked “captive” and excluded from GBIF and made difficult to find. Why should they be treated differently here?
But do include their provenance in the notes.
I think the key to interpreting the spirit of the policy is this statement:
“The main reason we try to mark things like this is because iNat is primarily about observing wild organisms, not pets, animals in zoos, garden plants, specimens in drawers, etc., and many scientific data partners are often not interested in (or downright alarmed by) observations of captive or cultivated organisms.”
I don’t think scientific data partners are alarmed by specimens reared to adult so that they can be identified because without the identification they have no data.
The counter argument (relevant for the caterpillar) is that the observation made at time of capture should reach Research Grade (based on the later identification using the adult) and the adult would remain Casual as it was reared in captivity. I suppose that might be the ideal approach? The challenge then would be to get people to go back to the juvenile observation and ID it based on the adult observation.
For the parasitoid, since there wasn’t an observation made in the wild, the only observation that could reach research grade (to be useful to scientists) would be the one reared in captivity. It’s not the same as a pet cat or zoo animal–you didn’t raise it intentionally in captivity..
