Do Observations of Cultural Items Made With Organisms Go Against iNat Guidelines?

[DianaStuder]

then - the observer can leave identifiers a note - what is the basket made of?

That iNat chooses to hurl together in the bin, anything which is Not Wild, or is broken in some way - is a peculiar choice.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112

[jasonhernandez74]

@papernautilus

The problem is that there is no way of knowing where the porcupine came from,

Unless the person uploading the observation was also the hunter of said porcupine. As it happens, I do have an observation of an article of shell jewelry in which I myself collected the shell. The observation notes describe the circumstances.

@susanne-kasimir

If I made the jewellery, I should have taken photos of the shells on the beach where I collected them.

Unless you didn’t know about iNaturalist then and only later decided to make an observation.

[natemarchessault]

@giannamaria I would just note that (at least to this point) none of these are staff replies and more reflect other people’s opinions and thoughts based on interpretations of iNat rules.

I would expect the iNat stance to be similar to where you seem to be coming from; if the people who created cultural object are OK with photographing the object then I’d expect there is no problem with it being on iNat, if they don’t want it photographed then it’s more an issue that a photograph was taken (and an iNat observation by association). I’m not sure there’d be any way to enforce such situations, though, unless staff were contacted by the people(s) in which the objects belong. These are just my thoughts, though.

[quyksilver]

@brnhn

Also one of the root purposes of inat is to engage people in the natural world. If someone decided they were interested in learning about the snails from a bunch of jewelry bought at a truck stop-- that fits the mission. Same with more interesting artifacts, we can’t say where a porcupine was hunted for it’s quills but it is still wildlife so I’d ID the porcupine, not the producer of the end product.

I once saw an observation by someone trying to learn what a thing in their salad was called. It was an olive. :)

[brnhn]

@quyksilver

I once saw an observation by someone trying to learn what a thing in their salad was called. It was an olive. :)

Adorable! I have looked up commercial foods a bunch of times on inat.

[juliereid]

I would identify things made by humans using any material including wild animals as Homo sapiens as they are creations of humans. That would automatically make them become Not Wild and Casual. If this is wrong I would appreciate knowing what would be correct.

[danaleeling]

I have my ethnobotany students here in Micronesia make an observation of the source plant for items of material culture that they or their family have made. The students write in the observation notes the material cultural use of the plant they observed. This activity is conceptually based on herbarium sheets that include ethnobotanical information about the plant on the herbarium sheet.

The students also bring the item to class (unless it is a traditional tree trunk hulled outrigger canoe or other large object) to present to the class on the production and use of the item.

Occasionally the students post an image of the material culture item instead of the source plant. Although I work with them to correct this error, some students never make the correction. I identify the source plant and mark the location as not accurate. If the source plant is known to be cultivated, I also mark the plant as not being wild.

As a result a few images of material culture items are left posted.

[jasonhernandez74]

@juliereid

If this is wrong I would appreciate knowing what would be correct.

The iNaturalist guideline to respect the observer’s intentions comes in here. If we are talking about something that has been considerably altered from its original appearance, such as an alligator purse, that would seem to be intended as an observation of a cultural item. But if we are talking about a single shell on a string of beads, that could conceivably be intended as an observation of the shell itself – especially if the location of the orignal collection was noted.

[papernautilus]

I don’t know what iNat policy is on this, but from my perspective, these would be very useful observations

Ideally, the students would take pictures of the living plant before harvesting it and then additional pictures of how the plant is processed to make it into string or whatever.

[danaleeling]

Thanks! I instruct the students not to photograph the cultural object as the images could get fed into the computer vision. This also parallels the ethnobotanical herbarium sheets: the pressed plant is on the sheet, the description of the ethnobotanical use is typed up and pasted onto the sheet, but no image of the cultural object is included.

[brnhn]

@jasonhernandez74

If we are talking about something that has been considerably altered from its original appearance, such as an alligator purse, that would seem to be intended as an observation of a cultural item.

Would it? Because if I saw an alligator purse I would only post it to inat if I was interested in finding out what kind of alligator it was. It would never occur to be to post a man-made object to identify as a man onto a wildlife website. It’s still evidence of an organism and in a lot of cases human artifacts are still identifiable as the organism.

[DianaStuder]

What did an alligator look like?
A handbag

[susanne-kasimir]

I have finally taken a picture of the street brooms which are still in use here ( and of course I am interested in which species of plant is used): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/262140446