I think you may have misunderstood or missed some key elements.
The first line of the webpage focuses overridingly on human intention:
“Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there.” Emphasis is in the original. As such, human intention is the most important element given in this page/definition.
The importance of intention is mostly in relation to location/movement of the organism, but intention also applies to care and support. For instance, an animal born into a zoo was not placed there intentionally by humans - it is the result of natural reproduction. But it is under human care, support, and confinement. It isn’t wild.
The list you cite is a variety of specific examples of the general principle given at the beginning of the post - ie, examples of how human intention plays out in real world examples. A few specific responses to your comments:
As long as the location of the observation is the original location the organism was observed (before a human grabbed it), the observation is wild. This is true even for pictures taken a day or two later in a lab, etc. Moving something a few meters is probably not a big deal. But if I took a caterpillar and moved it, even a few meters, to a different type of plant and took a picture of it there, I’d probably tick it as not wild or at least note that the caterpillar had not chosen that specific host plant. as I wouldn’t want to create data showing the caterpillar used a host plant it didn’t actually select.
I think you are misunderstanding this - the example’s intended meaning is just to distinguish between “natural” (defined here as non-human) and human-mediated dispersal. There’s nothing here that implies that long distance dispersal by a human is different than short distance dispersal. In fact, there is no mention anywhere in the source linked referencing the specific distance/displacement of an individual mattering aside from the example of garden plants escaping the gardening area (which serves as a proxy for human intention - humans intend the plants to be in the garden).
Most of these questions/issues have been addressed on the variety of other threads on the forum discussing cultivated/wild issues, and there are many responses from staff on those, so they may be worth checking out.
This is a bit tangential to the point, but I wanted to note that ruling these specific types of observations as “captive” has the downside of making it easier to miss possible accidental introductions. A lot of adventive species are introduced accidentally, and the availability of data on iNaturalist makes it a good way to keep an eye on places that these species accidentally pop up. Verifiable and research grade observations are generally more likely to be seen by scientists who are paying attention to this information, since they’ll come up in searches by default. Some of those are probably still edge cases, where not all of them should be considered wild. But if “would they have gotten to this location naturally” is a factor, then initial introductions of adventive and even invasive species would fall under “captive”, which seems like a pitfall. Realistically, so many things get introduced by humans that I’d argue that’s data worth taking into account.
Anyway, there’s a lot of discussion hashing out what exactly people think should be considered captive vs wild. There’s definitely a lot of disagreement about edge cases like this. I don’t have a solid answer one way or another! But I think it’s worth considering the usability of that data, and whether listing it as captive will make it less useful.
Either way though, it’s complicated. That’s why discussions about it pop up so often.
Another problem is that there are many organisms that won’t be seen alive unless they are taken captive. You won’t see a living Anadara tuberculosa unless you dig it out of the mud between mangrove roots and bring it to the surface (where it did not intend to be).
There’s also the question of phenology. A wild record contains other information beyond species and location. The date can be scientifically useful, but if it’s been reared indoors it might no longer be synchronised with its wild brothers. Ideally you should record it as you found it, (place, date and state of growth). Then your rearing of it is between you and the moth!
It appeared.
By iNat rules it is Wild, regardless of what you do or don’t.
If you planted the seed deliberately - that is Not Wild.
It is unfortunate that iNat names its Not Wild definition Cultivated. iNat jargon has absolutely nothing to do with how the word ‘cultivated’ is used in conversational English! Nothing.
I am a big supporter of rearing poorly documented caterpillars to add scientific data or even just photos of different life stages that don’t exist yet, but I don’t support making a new iNat observation for every new life stage. Sometimes I see complete series of, say, 6 different observations for the exact same individual, but four times as caterpillar, once as pupa and once as adult.
I feel it’s better to add the later photos to the original observation, with notes about pupation date, emerging date, etc. That way the wild individual is only recorded once, at the time and place it was originally found in. And that way you never get strange data that doesn’t fit the normal phenology, since you wouldn’t ever record the adult as a separate observation with a different date.
An observation is for an encounter with an individual organism at a specific place and time.
If the organism is documented subsequently at a later date, particularly if its life stage has changed or it has grown/developed in the meantime, a new observation should be created.
Except that following your advice you get exactly this – photos of an adult with a date that corresponds to when it was a larva, and annotations that do not fit the photos.
No, you get photos of a larva with a date and place that correspond to when it was a larva, and annotations describing the wild organism as it was when you found it. All extra photos, be it of the locality it was found in, the host plant it was sitting on, or later life stages, are just extra information to support the original observation. It’s helpful to leave a note explaining the larva was reared and what its host plant was and when the adult emerged, but the core information is simply the time and place of when you encountered the wild organism, and its life stage at that specific moment.
Except that they are not just “extra information”. All the additional photos are labelled by iNat with the date of the original observation – for all practical purposes they are treated as though they were taken at that particular time, not later. Anyone looking at the photos out of context will have no way of knowing that they are only “supplementary information”.
You suggestion explicitly contradicts iNat’s own guidelines:
An observation records an encounter with an individual organism, or recent evidence of an organism, at a particular time and location. […] If you revisit that organism later, such as returning to a plant on a later date when it’s in bloom, you should make a separate observation because it was observed on a different date.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with making multiple observations of the same individual. iNat data is occurrence data only; it cannot and is not intended to give reliable data about abundance. Moreover, if one frequently makes observations at a particular location, it is likely that one will sooner or later end up observing some individuals again at a later date, whether intentionally or not. Or some other person visiting the site may do so. These observations are not duplicates or bad or irrelevant data.
A series of observations of a single individual – each properly labelled with the date and context and linked to one another – may provide valuable information about phenology, development, habits etc. It cannot serve this purpose if everything is put into a single observation.
I completely agree with everything you say here, but this only applies to revisiting an organism in its original habitat. Things are very different when you take the organism from its original habitat and raise/rear it at home, especially indoors. The difference in temperature, humidity, amount of (sun)light, length of day and night, etc often seriously alter the growth process and almost always result in unnatural development and habits, where the organism doesn’t follow the usual phenology.
A butterfly that is supposed to hibernate and wouldn’t emerge in nature before June, could suddenly emerge in January when reared indoors. Now if we’d make a new observation for this butterfly, you’d get really bad, irrelevant data. Also, what location would you use for this new observation? If you’d use the original location, you’d be providing false information, because the organism isn’t there anymore. But you can’t use your house as the location either, because the organism never intended to be there. The only way making new observations could work here, is by leaving out the location and date and marking the observation captive, which means it will never be research grade and will never provide any useful information - it’ll just be the photo.
Basically, you could revisit an organism every day and make new observations every day, but as soon as the organism is taken from its original habitat, that moment should be the last independent observation that could become research grade. That’s why it’s OK to post dead, pinned insects or dried plants in collections, but the date and location should be of when and where they were collected, even though at that specific moment they were still alive and fresh and didn’t look anything like the photos!
I advise you to read the previous posts in this thread, as well as the threads linked to at the start of this thread, since the issues with phenology etc. of a reared insect have been addressed multiple times already. Marking the observation as captive is the correct choice once the insect has been taken home to be reared. There is no reason not to include a date and location that reflects the timeline in its captive state.
Just because an observation is captive does not mean it is “just a photo” and does not provide any useful information. While many IDers do not normally look at captive observations and captive observations cannot become RG, this does not mean the observations cannot be found or that they cannot used for research. If the subsequent observations are linked in the initial observation (via a url in the notes section or using an observation field), IDers can easily click though to find the later life stages. Particularly in cases where the adult form of a gall/larva/leaf miner is not known, or where there is no known way to distinguish the larval stages of several species in a genus, such observations provide very valuable information indeed, regardless of whether they are casual or not.
Specimens are a different case because they are killed and preserved immediately after collection – they may look different after having been pinned/pressed, but the key phenological information has not changed.
You should not take this approach according to iNat’s guidelines. @spiphany’s guidance above is correct. The first initial observation is wild, the rest, especially once life stages have changed, should be captive. Not doing so can cause a variety of problems. Observations of a same individual over a long period of time can be downvoted for “Date is correct”.
C. Thawley is correct about the iNaturalist guidelines but I think your approach is more helpful. It was what I proposed years ago when identifying seedlings - record them as wild seedlings where they were found, grow them on and show the mature plant as evidence of what the seedling is. But that was disapproved of.
This is the approach that I was taught on our Dutch platform that I’ve used for the past 10 years or so, before I even knew about iNat’s existence. Some of iNat’s guidelines feel very counter-intuitive to me, because they’re the opposite of what other platforms say and what I’ve been used to for years. The same goes for what we would label as ‘wild’ or ‘captive’ here or there, hence my continued confusion when these things come up.
Anyway, in the end I appreciate both platforms very much and the best thing to do is accept each platform’s guidelines and approach. So I’ve just gone and edited all of my observations of rearing projects, to conform iNat’s guidelines.
Re: photos of seedlings or caterpillars that were found wild and then raised in captivity.
You can link them using the field “Same specimen over time” or by pasting the URL of the other observations into each observation (whether the observations are captive or wild). Showing the development of the organisms over time is really valuable! It should be accomplished by posting separate observations and linking them, not by posting photos from different dates or by posting as organisms as wild during times when they are captive/cultivated.