For organisms barely moving and on riding death’s edge - should these be flagged as alive? Or dead, since they’re practically there or will be very soon?
Example: I find a beetle on a bicycle path that has been run over. It’s stuck to the pavement by its own insides. I peel it off to put it in my hand and get a better photo, and its legs start moving slowly as it tries to crawl away. Is it better to flag this as dead, since it has no future at this point? Or alive, since it’s still moving?
With an insect like in your example, I think that the only reason they are moving is muscle spasms/movements that happen after death. In your example, I would annotate it as dead.
Yeah this is an interesting question. I come across “roadkill” often that is still alive but obviously mortally wounded, and if I can I try and humanely dispatch it myself. I would usually annotate it as dead if there is no possibility of survival and it will likely dies within minutes or hours naturally, but it’s an interesting (and unfortunate) circumstance.
From iNat Help:
EDIT: The first paragraph of my comment is incorrect, a dying but not dead yet organism should be annotated as dead per iNat help, however I think this should only be used for actively dying organisms, not anything the observer predicts will eventually succumb to their injuries, some animals can recover from surprisingly severe injuries, and I would think a rabid animal running around acting aggressive is alive, even though we know rabies is pretty much unsurvivable.
I think a severely injured or ill organism should be marked alive as long as it is not actually dead. I interpret the observation fields as referring to the current state of the organism at the moment of photography, not asking the observer or others to try to give a prognosis on the injuries.
However, the beetle you mention may actually be dead and moving only due to residual nerve impulses. Insect nervous systems are less centralized and the insect may be squished to death while neurological function initially remains intact in any appendages that remain structurally sound.
Now if only the abdomen is destroyed (abdomen is probably 60-80% of the insect in beetles) the insect is probably alive, insects do not die immediately upon losing their abdomens. In territorial wars of the pavement ant Tetramorium immigrans, ants will continue to fight after losing their abdomen in battle, and I observe ants foraging normally with missing abdomens.
At the time of observing, the organism was alive, and to me it makes no sense to flag a living organism as ‘dead’, just because it might be dead soon. To me, the annotation that something is ‘dead’ means that it has (probably) been dead for a long time and that the date of the observation should not be used to understand life cycles, behaviour or flight patterns.
Let’s say a certain butterfly species is on the wing only in June and July. I find a dead one in October. I mark it ‘dead’, so we don’t get a record of a live butterfly in October, which would be very weird and seriously mess up the statistics. Now if I find one in June, that is happily flying around and then gets caught in a spider’s web, I will not mark it ‘dead’, because it was alive right there at that time and that is valuable data for the statistics.
Bones or completely dried up insects are clearly dead and have been so for a while, but a moth that just got caught by a dragonfly, or a caterpillar that was just caught and paralyzed by a wasp, only to serve as food for its young, are not dead. They were alive right there and then and that is valuable data. And who knows how many of the clearly alive critters we see, end up in a similar situation just as we take our eyes off them, and die within minutes?
As the person who wrote that definition, I agree with @rupertclayton. I was specifically thinking of situations like coming across a snake that had been run over, having seen way too much of that in my time. Or anything mortally wounded. I personally also annotate things like fish in a bird’s bill, if I see the bird swallow it. I’d understand why someone would disagree, though.
There are always going to be edge cases, regardless of any rule or definition, and people really seem to like debating those. But that’s why we have comments and a voting system on each observation, people can hash it out on the observation itself.
I understand but I disagree. Annotating a dying snake on a road that had been run over is pretty helpful when it comes to understanding roadkill data and potentially creating road crossing mitigation.
I think in this case there might be issues with annotations for predation looking like scavenging if the prey was caught live and annotated as dead
I think using it for fatal injuries is kind of a grey area. The obviously dying snake make sense, but I don’t think we should try to guess whether the seal bitten by a shark will lose a fatal amount of blood or whether the bear with a broken arm will starve as a result (it may not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcIkQaLJ9r8)
It could be a cool title for a movie: The Phenology of Death
In my herp collecting days when I took specimens, our annotations in field notes or specimen tags for animals taken on a road were AOR (alive), DOR (dead), and IOR (injured).
Probably didn’t make a huge difference although sometimes the DOR had been there a while (perhaps a day or two). The AOR and IOR notes did communicate something about activity times.
I understand but I disagree. Annotating a dying snake on a road that had been run over is pretty helpful when it comes to understanding roadkill data and potentially creating road crossing mitigation.
In that case, it might be helpful to have a third option, something like ‘roadkill’ or ‘victim of traffic’. This is more neutral and doesn’t put so much weight on whether the organism is actually dead or not, plus it clearly separates all roadkill victims from other (natural) causes of dead.
This way, a live snake in a Snake-eagle’s beak can be annotated ‘alive’ (since it is alive at the time of the observation) and offer valuable data about the phenology of the snake. In other words: that snake species is active on that day of the year in that area, even if some individuals get eaten by an eagle. A dried up snake can be annotated ‘dead’, so the observation date will not be used to see when this snake is active, since we don’t know when it died. And finally a snake that was run over by a car can be annotated ‘roadkill’, to offer valuable roadkill data, but not necessarily phenology data.
This is not something that seems appropriate as an annotation, but there are already lots of observation fields and projects to track roadkill.