I’ve observed a tuliptree seed and what appears to be some sort of seed in lettuce. The other day, I found what I think is a spider (I haven’t examined the photos yet) in bok choy. Should I set the location to home or to the store where I bought it?
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I’d use your home as the location but note in the description field that the organism was found as a hitchhiker in produce, and if the produce lists country of origin (on stickers, exterior packaging, whatever) I would note that as well.
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Not meant as criticism, but a genuine question: Are these really observations we want to upload to iNat? We know that the organism was brought to the store by humans and not because it itself chose to travel there, but according to iNat’s guidelines it would still be wild “because humans didn’t intend for it to be there”, but it’s also not even an escaped organism outside in nature, that should be recorded to track potential invasive species. What’s the point?
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For the spider, you can add the project and observation fields used in this observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10024901 (Chilean lady beetle in Texas from grapes)
I think these observations are fair for iNat both because they’re interesting and because this is a method by which invasive species and pests are transported and it may be helpful to track patterns in which species are hitchhiking and where.
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Thanks!
Yes.
- iNat users are welcome to record any observation they have with the living world. We don’t need to police the merits of particular users’ choice of what to observe. To me, it seems these organisms would probably be marked as captive/cultivated because they were in the store or home due to human actions. If the observer believes the organisms got there of their own accord, then maybe they would be wild. Either type of observation is fine.
- Tracking occurrences of non-native species moved around by the agricultural industry is certainly one of the many ways iNat data can be used, and that might include spiders and plant seeds hitchhiking on produce. But in any case iNat doesn’t require observers to demonstrate that an observation has provable value.
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I say yes, because in the US, we’ve had one too many devastating nonnative invasive species hitchhike on agricultural products or in other imported goods.
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a bit off-topic but as a long-time bugnerd and former produce clerk, i always kept an eye out for critters as i worked. in the few instances i found a spider, it was always a local species and probably got into the box in the distribution center or on a truck. i always heard stories about ctenids in banana boxes and i optimistically opened a lot of banana boxes over the years to no avail 
one time a customer brought me a bag of grapes with a sizable mass of white stuff between some of the fruit, ‘this bag has some mold in it.’ i thanked her and took the grapes but then said ‘oh this isn’t mold, that’s spider silk!’ i moved the grapes around a bit and exposed a bunch of eggs and the momma. the customer was a bit disturbed and said ‘that’s even worse!’ lol
but YES upload such an observation but definitely list any sourcing information you can. i’d probably set the location to my home and obscure it (i’d probably set it to casual anyway)
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I’ve found caterpillars and aphids in a fair amount of my greens, and beetles in my oatmeal (Now they are all over my house eating all my grains for several years 
)
I don’t even know how these things are being packed, and I’m still confused about the beetles. They were from Kroger’s, by the way. I don’t trust their oatmeal anymore. I don’t know where Kroger’s got all their stuff though. So I just went with my city when I submitted observations of those pesky beetles.
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Oh grain and flour beetles are the worst. You gotta put all your flour and grains and pasta in ziploc bags.
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I’ve iNatted stuff like a leafminer in my chard. But I marked it as not wild and used the date, time and location of where I encountered it in my kitchen.
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Here is a project collecting hitchhikers
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/invisible-travelers-hitchhiking-animals
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This post appeared with uncanny timing, after I just found a tiny live lepidopteran larva in my Brussels sprouts this Tuesday! I was amazed the little critter was still doing fine - the sprouts had been in the fridge for ten days and were a bit dried out (but nonetheless tasty caramelized with some asiago on top, and with the caterpillar no longer in residence).
Seems to me that these should be considered wild, as they were wild when they got into the produce; this would follow the same thinking that others have applied to unintentionally human-transported insects like this one: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/258744533
Yet another of the edge cases that we love to talk about here in the forum :)
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Once your ID reaches “Research Grade” these observations should be marked “Data Quality: Organism is Wild: No” as @rupertclayton suggested. Marking the observation this way makes it Casual and removes it from the ID queue, so wait until the ID is confirmed by a second person. Leaving it “Research Grade” would pollute the range maps for where these occur in the wild. Scientists studying this data can then choose whether to include Casual observations or not when determining ranges.
Many invasive species arrived on shipped goods as @asteroidowl and @upupa-epops said, and that’s a good reason to have these observations on iNat, but I agree with @joeybom that they should only be represented as “wild” once you find them in the wild. An alien insect that gets a few yards from the store and dies is not a threat. Only when it breeds and overwinters in the surrounding vegetation (or at least enough of them live long enough to cause harm to the natural world) does it become a serious problem.
@mreith’s Hitchhiking Animals group seems perfect for these observations and provides a good way to find them.
I’m hesitant to post observations from my home. I’d manually set the location on iNat to the store where you bought them. I know the photo EXIF data has your home location, but at least make people work for it a little bit. I think this is legitimate, because if you collected specimens in the field, you’d mark their location as where you collected them from, and you collected your produce from the store.
This had an ID as “Vaquita Eriopis connexa”, which confused me for a moment, since the only vaquita I was aware of is a cetacean in the Gulf of California.
Already a member. But what about hitchhiking seeds? (Tuliptrees are local, so the fact that the tuliptree obs is RG doesn’t skew much; the other seed hasn’t been identified as anything but angiosperm.)
I set the previous two to the store. The EXIF data do not include location, because my camera doesn’t have a GPS receiver; when I observe while surveying, I have to convert state plane to lat-long, then lat-long from DMS to decimal degrees. And anything I observe at home is obscured.
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These observations are wild according to iNat’s definition.
I think the concern about “polluting range maps” is overblown. Scientists studying the data are also capable of excluding outliers, and some of these outliers have the potential to in fact become new invasive species.
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I’m with people that these observations are worth uploading, but I think marking as captive/cultivated is a mistake. Organisms get accidentally transported all the time, this is still interesting and worthwhile data. Captive/cultivated is described as an organism is a time and place where a human intended it to be. In this case, the animal (presumably) got in vegetables by accident. There was no human intention, it just so happens that they incidentally moved by humans without intention to do so.
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I agree these should be posted as “wild”, as they were not moved intentionally. As soon as you start arguing that certain forms of unintentional human interaction to move the organism make it become “captive”, that opens up a whole messy can of worms. Where do you draw the line at that point? If you’re into the competitive aspect of hardcore bird “listing” you’ll be familiar with all the rules that have been put in place to deal with this. A bird shows up out of range, and immediately there’s debate about its origin- was it a “ship assist” or an aviary escape? How prone to long-distance travel is the species? Are weather patterns consistent with a system that would carry the bird here from its normal range? Search all the local zoos for who keeps the species. Talk to all the falconers in the region to see if anyone lost a bird. Ultimately, have a committee vote on whether the bird is “countable” based on all these factors. If a bird was caught in a banding net, it’s only wild for you if you set up the banding net. Once released, others need to wait for the bird to “regain typical behavior” after release before it counts as wild for them. The rules are pages and pages long and detail every possible edge case and what is and isn’t “countable” for your official list. I don’t want iNat to be that. Having a very simple “wild if no one put it there on purpose” rule is better than the convoluted alternative.
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Thanks for explaining that, Paul. I’m not too familiar with birding. This is the first time I’ve heard of anything with more edge cases than iNat.
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The American Birding Association’s rules are here, I think they’re fairly intuitive although yes there’s often debate about how individual cases fit into them. Ship assisted is the most analogous situation to this thread and is considered countable (there are some neat observations on eBird documenting a group of Bramblings riding a ship between Siberia and California, with the group slowly declining in number over the course of the voyage).
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