iNaturalist has a lot of dead animal observations. I don’t say that dead animals should not be accepted, but I think that we could focus more on the live ones. Why?
That is because I think that we could learn more about protecting these animals and watching their actions and behaviors than from watching a dead, unmoving animal. Dead animals, though, could still be helpful, and I think that deeper research should be done on them. Where did they die? How did they die? What could we do to prevent it? To help, plz join Operation Deceased Data · iNaturalist.
This is sometimes part of the reason people post observations of roadkill, in hopes the data may someday be useful to decision makers considering the placement of wildlife crossings.
It is sad though. I much prefer looking at photos of live animals, but I think the dead ones can have equal - and depending on how they died sometimes greater - scientific value.
Welcome to the Forums.
I completely understand, I have a hard time with some of the roadkill or fatality observations but I do think that there have been some great things that involve dead animal observations. There was a project that helped count the window collisions in, I think, Chicago and it helped raise enough awareness that it made national news.
I think that in order for us, in general, to address the animal fatalities that are a byproduct of humans we first need to consider where we are causing those fatalities without meaning to.
I agree with all that, that’s why I think we shouldn’t remove all dead animal observations, that way, we can do research on those besides doing live animal protection research.
Some animals are much easier to observe dead than living. Specifically, many mollusks live deep underwater where few of us will have the chance to see them alive, but many of us will see their dead shells washed up on beaches. Some species may have never been observed alive.
Well, if dead animals were eliminated, we’d probably lose the observations of at least 50% of marine mollusk species, maybe more. Except for the common intertidal species, living ones just aren’t that easy to observe. Divers can observe and photograph mollusks in shallow coastal waters, but just the larger species and those that are not buried in the substrate. Most bivalves are burrowers and there are thousands of mollusk species that measure only a few millimeters. These are unlikely to be observed by divers and even if they are, they are often difficult to identify from a photograph because they are covered with other encrusting organisms. So, since most iNatters do not have dredging equipment, many species can only practically be observed from shells cast up dead on the beach.
“iNaturalist has a lot of dead animal observations”
Like @pburka has said, I think that’s part of why there’s a bunch more dead observations than live for some taxon, because they avoid contact with humans or can be harder to observe e.g. possums!
Maybe we don’t need to focus more on alive animals, but we could cut down on dead animal observations when the animal could be observed live. It would reduce the risk of getting disease, and save time for the more important dead animal observations.
That’s a cool idea! I feel like I hear about stuff like this for birds, but not many other species. I’d be interested to see what you could learn from some mammals just based on visual as it’s not something I’m super familiar with
I will say that observations of dead animals induce thinking and it’s something very valuable. I think we skip more observations of live animals than we skip observations of dead animals.
I have an observation of a gull eating a bird. It’s super gross:
Like I said earlier, we could do a project on researching and gathering data on dead animals. And it shouldn’t be just scientists doing it. If many people, no matter their status, helped, endangered animals could be rescued. So I suggest that we do projects like this one (a project by me) Operation Deceased Data · iNaturalist.