It’s a lie that you saw it at that date, another person did, you saw it now as casual, you can’t change the date of when you saw the organism to a different one, you weren’t at the place, you didn’t see that plant growing, you saw it dead on a paper.
Let’s be careful with terminology here. At least in English, “lie” and “lying” imply intentional and often malicious deception. I don’t think that is what’s behind the motivations or intentions being discussed here.
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Some herbarium/musem specimens here and there are not a big deal if properly marked.
Uploading to GBIF or something like iDigBio seems like the best avenue for these records.
This seems correct to me for most applications (eg a mushroom specimen is taken from the wild for a spore print and microscopy). Something like a reared pupa is more of a gray area. IMO it’s better to make separate observations for the pupa in the wild and the eclosed adult in captivity and post links to the observations.
Here’s a paper that describes protocol for linking herbarium specimens with iNat records.
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Lie is just the opposite of the truth, I don’t add any connotations to that, if you know you weren’t there at that date and still add it, it’s a lie no matter how pure your intentions are, motivations don’t matter when facts get distorted, it’s your name that will be shown with this record, not a person who actually was there.
Yes, of course, there are more complex cases than adults collected in the wild. In some groups of insects, the main method of obtaining adults is to rear them from their hosts (plants or other insects). Some species have never been observed in the wild - even by those who have described them. For example (Tephritis pseudovespertina sp. n.). But such specimens are attributed in the articles according to the place and time of collection of the host - with the indication “reared from”. In such cases, it is not clear what can be the evidence of an “in situ” observation. It seems to me that a just a photo of the host plant is not. Especially since it is unlikely that anyone photographs each of the potentially infected specimens collected.
Thus, in such cases, an adult reared in the laboratory has not actually been observed in the wild (even as a pupa or larva). But IMO, if it is only considered captive, important information about its origin from a certain place in the wild would be lost. I don’t know what would be the best solution for such specimens in iNaturalist. It is common scientific practice to consider them as wild.
I apologize if I’m getting too into specific edge cases.
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If it’s not intentional but still wrong, it’s a mistake or a falsehood. A lie almost always comes from an intent to decieve.
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No, in English a lie is the opposite of honesty - there is definitely an intention behind it like cheating. Consequently people will get upset and defensive when accused of lying. For example, if I ask a question on an exam, I can ask the students to determine whether a statement is true or false. If I ask them to write an answer to a question and a student copies a wrong answer from some website and claims they wrote it themselves, then the answer to the question is false (they didn’t know the correct answer) and the statement that they wrote it themselves is a lie (they’re trying to cheat on the exam).
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But they do it intentional, it’s clear for them they put not the date they see the organism, they may think they do the right thing, but the know it’s not the representation of life.
Which means telling the perceived truth. If you make observation and add the date of 1920 (that on iNat means you saw it on that date), that’s the same as if you copied an answer from someone else, the only difference is that a student does that for own gain and iNat user can do the same or more likely because they think this record should be on the site no matter what.
It would never have occurred to me that anyone would consider me as trying to deceive if I posted a herbarium specimen with its correct location and date (and collector, if not me). Mounted herbarium specimens are so obviously what they are! Perhaps it would be good to add a statement making it clear where the specimen is and when I saw it. (Perhaps not.)
I think Marina and I will never agree on this, but that’s OK. Fortunately, I very rarely have reason to post herbarium specimens on iNaturalist.
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My impulse would be to mark museum specimens captive if the date was the time of it being photographed in said museum…one could say marking date correct as “no” would be a more accurate response, but at the same time, if we imagined this specimen was alive, all those years in a museum would be enough to call it captive.
Interesting. I’ll have to read it more thoroughly. My initial impression is that this is a way of manually creating links between data when it should be possible to automate that process. The combination of collector, name used by the collector, date, and location should be adequate in almost all cases—assuming you can match those fields between the herbarium record and iNaturalist, you should be able to automatically associate the two (presumably with a little fuzziness added to the coordinates & a check for multiple iNat records matching a given specimen & vice versa). The limiting factors seem to be standardizing the collector identity (or establishing appropriate lookup tables) and being able to record the name used by the collector on iNaturalist. (The number of collectors is likely to be small enough in practice that creating a lookup table manually would be pretty easily feasible; the name used by the collector is more difficult to resolve without changes to iNaturalist.)
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I think that museum specimens, herbarium specimens, etc., that died at the time of collection can be marked with the date and place of collection because they didn’t change after that. That’s the date and place relevant for how they look, back when they were wild. Live animals in zoos or rehabilitation places and life plants in greenhouses or botanic gardens continue to change. They should be dated (and located) at the time they’re photographed, and marked captive/cultivated. In my opinion.
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Part of the rationale for an automated process, BTW, is that I think this could achieve greater resiliency to future change—a link established by basic features of the data that don’t change is more likely to be recreatable if needed than one established to a particular record in a particular website. My assumption is that the likelihood of the observation records on iNaturalist existing in the future is much higher than the likelihood of iNaturalist itself existing in the future. Websites are relatively short-lived, but people are likely to want to migrate large data sets, if possible.
If we’re talking about uploading an observation with your account, but marking it with the time and place that someone else observed it, I can’t see that being unintentional.
It will appear with your username and avatar as the observer. It will take some more careful looking to see where you notated who the collector was.
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I don’t think you deceive, but all those herbariums will be under your name no matter what you write in description, in GBIF you will be the author and I doubt many will check every herbarium sheet checking if author is a collector. That data will always be assigned as yours, so unless you’re a time traveler, there’s a problem in that.
Yes, this is a good illustration of why iNaturalist is far from ideal for posting museum specimens, especially when they were not directly observed at the time of collection by the person posting.
As with photographs, iNaturalist tolerates occasional posting on behalf of someone else, with their permission as indicated in the post, but does not want us to make a regular habit of it. In the case of a museum specimen, permission would need to be from the “owner” of the specimen, generally the host institution.
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That’s a very good point and where things may get complicated from a photo licensing standpoint. The same applies to pictures of animals and plants at zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, etc. Many of these places and museums have photography rules, often requiring permission for commercial photography at least. Even if photographing for personal use is permitted, posting (and therefore essentially publishing) pictures to iNat probably goes beyond just personal use.
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