Evidence of organism inside hay bag

General
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This is definitely a general idea that I’ve seen discussed on the forum before but I did want to bring up an exact situation since it’s a little different from others I’ve seen.

The summary is that I found an owl pellet in a bag of hay. I know where the hay in the bag was harvested because the address is on the bag. The current location is where I found it in the bag because that’s where I encountered it and literally observed it. Should I move the location to the exact place of where it was harvested since that must be where it found its way to the bag / was harvested along with the hay?

There are other instances I can recall specifically where there were similar instances and the location was determined to be where the observer actually saw it, but those instances also didn’t have an exact location to trace the origin to, that I know of. Like one time it was a spotted lanternfly observed in Utah, found in a bag of produce. And another time it was a lizard observed in Buffalo, found through shipping of flowers and such for a greenhouse. Both of those had the mentality that they should have the location of where it was seen, rather than where it came from, but I suspect those instances didn’t have a way to say exactly where it came from, where I have that ability.

I’m just curious as to what the outlook is for this specific situation, since I have information that I think is usually not known in similar instances.

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Keep the location where you observed it. After all, it is literally where you observed it. The evidence got there by means that were not intentional, so it still qualifies as wild.

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The lizard in Buffalo isn’t really an anagalous situation, btw, since there’s an established population at that location.

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That’s fair. It’s just something similar that stuck with me. I’ve definitely seen other cases closer aligned to what I encountered with the hay bag, including other things I’ve found in a hay bag, but I can’t recall them specifically.

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If you wanted to retain the information about where it was harvested, you could put the location in the observation description so anyone looking at it later would have that info.

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in a case like this, I would probably go for putting the point at the actual place of origin, since you have that information. I don’t think most of the other cases are analogous – the actual organisms were moved in most cases, whereas the owl that produced the pellet is not physically at the place where the bag was then taken.
maybe I’m too much a purist, but I myself therefore would not post an observation for an owl pellet in a hay bag if I didn’t know the original locality (or would mark “location not accurate” if I did post it). it seems to be the case that the owl itself didn’t crawl into the bag and go along for the ride, so the location of finding is not relevant for putting an occurrence point in for proxying an owl population. (I am saying this as a researcher who uses iNaturalist data.)

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I’m more of an experimentalist, maybe too much so by some people’s standards. I like to try and see what works or how to make things work, especially in unclear instances like this. It makes me think about things in new ways.

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He doesn’t know the date the pellet was created though, whereas he does know the exact date and location of where he encountered it.

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I also can’t say I experienced it in its place of origin. My experience with this evidence is that it was in a hay bag and discovered in NY. If the observation is meant to reflect my experience with nature, then the current location is most accurate to that.

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then I probably would not post, or would mark date not accurate, the observation.

this makes sense, but again, I’m thinking about the issue from the point of view of: how can I use an observation (or observations in bulk) to serve as a proxy for sampling a population, or for illustrating where the individual organism can be found? I think there are several ways of approaching observing for iNaturalist, and I’m most focused on the “end use”, namely what to do with data that are exported to (say) GBIF. if the concern is reflecting your experience of it, then by all means post [about] the pellet, but unless you can infer the original date and location, there isn’t an especially clear motivation for ensuring it makes Research Grade, for example.

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iNat isn’t for sampling a population or creating range maps. It’s for recording our experiences with nature. GBIF imports what GBIF wants, if they don’t want it they don’t have to import it.

Also please don’t mark the date inaccurate, as that’s just straight up incorrect. Do not post fake DQA votes.

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This is part of the diversity and multiple uses of the site, which I love. The mission statement is to get people to connect with nature, for me sometimes that’s taking data from observations, other times it is finding weird stuff in a hay bag. For some, it’s all about data and some it’s all about just reflecting stuff they see… I think it can be looked at a few different ways and I’m pretty sure different interpretations are mainly valid outlooks.

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this is not true. there is no “does GBIF ‘want’ this data?” step. it goes into the DarwinCore file whether we (the researchers) want it or not, and it’s up to us to filter it out. GBIF does not have volition as an entity.
I do not intentionally “post fake DQA votes”. do not post unsupported accusations of bad faith. I am trying to improve data quality rather than cater to “listers”. there is no reason solely for the purposes of recording experiences with nature that an observation should reach Research Grade; on the other hand, an observation not pertinent to mapping wild populations clearly should not reach Research Grade.

I agree with this… but again, there’s nothing “bad” about a Casual grade observation, it counts just the same as an instance of connecting with nature/organisms. the point of contention mostly seems to come with the mechanism of exporting Research Grade observation data.

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The way that system works is inherently poorly designed in my opinion, and unfair. I don’t think they’re “bad” either, but it’s essentially a place to dump observations for a myriad of reasons, which is an unfortunate set up.

I do not think this should be “not wild” because there’s no reason to think the owl was captive. I also don’t think the location should be inaccurate because the location is accurate to where I saw the pellet, and where it was observed, and it got there unintentionally, so I don’t think there’s reason for it to be inaccurate. I believe the location in Omaha could be considered accurate too, but then the images themselves are from a different place which feels more like an inaccurate location than what it currently is. I think there’s some validity to both.

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I do totally agree on this; Casual grade currently serves as a bin for a large number of unrelated types of observations (cultivated/captive is a very different ballgame from anything with DQA marks against it in other ways). I can understand why it’s not a priority to subdivide it further, but there are some cases where – for example – imprecise date wouldn’t be a hindrance for some biodiversity studies.

on the subject of the location of this pellet, yes, it is where you saw it; but it isn’t even where the organism left it. this may be more a philosophical difference rather than a fundamental pillar of considering something to be Research Grade material though. I would not consider a fly that I found in my car while driving long-distance, after I had only had the car open to the air back near my home neighbourhood, to “count” at the rest stop along the interstate where I finally stopped and found it prior to opening the car door (this is a real example!), but judgment will probably vary on that.

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See, I would consider that to count because that’s where it ended up, incidentally. I think it definitely does “count”, but if you don’t personally want it to then you don’t have to have it count. But it could, especially by iNaturalist’s standards. But again, that’s what makes these things fun and interesting to me. I think the site can be used in abstract ways, which may not benefit all possibilities of different usages of the site but it can make your experiences with nature more interesting or change how you interact with nature.

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Yes, but GBIF chooses to take observations off iNat in that way. If they wanted to be more picky, they would. They know full well what the iNat database contains.

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Where the organism left is it not a qualification on the iNat wild definition. If there were requirements for how far evidence can travel from the “parent” organism and still be wild, they would tell us.

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When you record an organism that has been spread by forces that have nothing to do with humans, it is fairly easy “living organisms dispersed by the wind, water, and other forces apart from humans” are wild, as the FAQ state.

:warning: But when an organism was spread/ displaced by humans, another part (also mentioned in the FAQs) comes into play, which is "Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there. "

When it was not intended, as discussed in the answers above - you can mark the organism wild for the location where you found it. It is great to have the additional information of where the organism originated, if you have this information. You can just note it down in the description, a comment or an observation field, this will help everyone to interpret the observation correctly.

:bulb: Observations like this can provide additional information to research - they show, which species are transported unintentinally from one region to another, helping to understand mechanisms of potential introduction of new species, spread of potential pests, deseases, potential widening of the natural occurence of species, amongst other things.

For me, it is a fascinating thing to see species from another part of the world, that I would not be able to observe otherwise - hence I started looking more intentionally for non-intentionally transported Coccoidea on citrus fruits and bananas - and there were quite a few species that were new for me, here some examples.

On some of the observations I put the location of the origin of the fruits in the comments (when the information was available when I uploaded the observation). For the case that I received the information later, I put it in the comments, so that it would be more visible for people that already reviewed the observation. To unify, I might eventually put that information into

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I agree that observations like these are interesting and potentially useful for research. For that reason, I would give the location as that of the encounter (not the origin) - to me, it’s much more interesting that a pellet was transported a long distance in a bag of hay rather than that there was an owl in a hayfield.

As others have noted, iNat observations record interactions with nature - the interaction was definitely at the location where the pellet was found (not in the hayfield), which also argues for making the location where the pellet was found, not at its origin.

Additionally, if the location was given as the origin, no date could be added (since it is unknown), so the observation would be casual grade.

In terms of wild vs/ captive, this is an interesting scenario as the “organism” (the pellet) did not intend to be in this location, but neither did a human intentionally move it. When an organism is moved unintentionally (a stowaway lizard in a car, an insect on a piece of fruit), we can at least say that the organism was intending to be in the car or on the fruit (even if they didn’t intend a human to move the car/fruit). However, in this case, we can’t say that for the pellet (not actually a living organism), which is a little bit of a grey area. In spite of that, this seems more akin to a wild observation to me as it is dispersed unintentionally.

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