I’m a little surprised that I’m not finding this question already asked. How should animals which were killed during hunting or fishing be annotated? I assume in the case of an observation of an animal which had already been dispatched before the photos were taken should be marked as dead, but what about observations which do not include photos taken after the animal had died? I have a few fish which were harvested ice fishing, which are currently marked as dead because they were dispatched right after the images were taken and we had ensured they were legal size, but they are alive in all of the images in the observation. Should I change their annotations?
1st Walleye
Black Crappie
2nd Walleye
3rd Walleye
4th Walleye
Thanks in advance for any answer!
In short, pictures should be annotated as they were when the photo was taken. If the fish is still alive in the photo, I’d mark it as alive.
Annotations are for the observation itself, not any specific pictures, so it is possible that observations given the time and place when an organism was alive can include pictures taken later when the organism is dead. Such observations should be annotated as alive.
If the date/time of your observations are after death, then I would annotate dead.
For the observations you mentioned, assuming the time of the observation is when the fish were alive, I’d annotate as alive. On a related note, this is probably more informative about the species as they definitely were alive at the time observed (and most users of data will be looking for “alive” records). Users might often assume that “dead” records shouldn’t be used/mixed in with live ones.
There’s also some related discussion on this topic:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/dqa-for-specimens-removed-from-the-wild/40368
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.