Due to Human Observations in Schools - General - iNaturalist Community Forum and Human Observations with Wild/Captive/Introduced/Native statuses - General - iNaturalist Community Forum; and the fact that humans being marked as “wild”, “captive”, “location inaccurate”, or other DQA votes; I recommend that the DQA should be disabled for observations of humans.
In my opinion, there is no scientific value in marking human observations with DQA votes. All human observations are “Casual” by default, the DQA does not affect that at all. Please share your thoughts.
I think I’d be OK with this if the Community Taxon was a Homo sapiens.
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I agree, if the taxon name is Homo sapiens.
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Beyond this, I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument why observations of humans are permissible on this website.
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Agree! They’re usually non-consensual photos of strangers, or photos of friends posted as a joke. Wasted server space with no scientific value.
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you can flag to be hidden - also for the ‘joke’ IDs.
Not all observations with an ID of “Homo sapiens” are photos of humans.
Some are photos of human-made objects that were mistaken by the observer for some non-human organism (chewing gum “lichens”, worn survey whiskers disguising themselves as grasses, plastic beach blobs, artificial flowers, etc.). These are legitimate observations generally made in good faith and I think there are good arguments for leaving them on iNat for reference purposes.
Photos of human artifacts are probably even more likely than photos of humans to get DQA’d to make them casual, since they may start out with an ID of something else. So in the context of this feature request, it may be relevant to consider whether the DQA should be greyed out (as in other situations where specific DQA items are inapplicable to a particular observation) or removed entirely from the observation display as long as the community ID is Homo sapiens. I think the latter would probably be preferable, since I believe that at present previous votes on DQA items that are later greyed out still continue to be displayed, which would mean that observations that were voted “not wild” before the community ID was “human” would continue to appear in Explore filters for non-wild observations
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To the extent iNaturalist allows the inclusion of ecological interactions it might be worth including a human entry to show the interaction with another species - pretty sure I have photos on here of mosquitoes feeding on me so it might make sense to also include an entry for Homo sapiens to cover off the other side of the interaction.
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Out of curiosity, I checked the Who Eats Whom? project. There are more observations of parasites feeding on Homo sapiens than there are of linked observations of the Homo sapiens in question. For example there are five observations of mosquitoes feeding on humans but none of them have a linked observation, which means they can’t be searched for by host through the project.
I am not sure if there are any projects specifically for parasites feeding on humans; a quick search didn’t bring any up.
Many parasites are very host-specific so being able to search by host like this can be useful in identification. I’ve certainly found it useful for identifying plant parasites and herbivores, which is why even casual observations of cultivated plants have come in handy for me before.
However, there are several observation fields that can be useful for this even without a duplicate entry for the host, such as Host and Parasite Host, which each have a handful of entries for Homo sapiens. I’m not terribly squeamish, but I won’t link directly to the entries for humans because some of those observations definitely have a squick factor.
Overall I think human entries can be useful in cases like this and ones mentioned by @spiphany – saw a rubber snake observation today that I think was uploaded in good faith by the observer, for example! – and I have found the occasional humorous entry of humans to be amusing and not particularly intrusive. I don’t believe disabling DQA for Homo sapiens would affect these use cases negatively for the most part.
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After thinking about it more, and discussing it with other staff, I agree with @spiphany that for things like “Evidence of organism” may be useful. I think probably the only DQA section that could really be legitimately used for bullying is probably the “Organism is wild” one. “Location is accurate” or something seems like a non sequitur.
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The organism is wild one is the main issue.
Specifically, you can separate observations of “wild” humans and “captive” humans.
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Humans shouldn’t be marked captive (aka “not wild”) - this has been discussed before. Disabling that choice on observations already rendered casual by having a community ID of Homo sapiens might encourage actually putting an ID on such observations rather than just hitting the “not wild” DQA and leaving it “unknown” for others to sort that out.
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