How should taxidermy observations be treated?

[DianaStuder]

I use Captive as iNat’s jargon for Not Wild.

[norm_shea]

Ooh, I see I had some typos in there, it was too late to be creating a forum post after a long day of traveling. That said, I was referring to spiphany’s post

@spiphany

I don’t see how this is substantially different than a zoo animal or a wild animal temporarily living at a rehabilitation center, except that it came under human control after it was already dead.

which I took to refer to animals (not that insects aren’t animals but I guess extrapolated to furbearers). I don’t think this applies to insects or plants, since the original organism is more or less intact. I also would not think it applied to skeletal displays. And I feel think some furbearer displays could also be included, if there done well, which I realize is somewhat subjective.

[norm_shea]

Tony, could you provide a little clarification? Relating to paul_dennehy post regarding,

@paul_dennehy

Pinned insects… ; herbarium specimens

If there is documentation for an organism in a museum or herbarium that includes the date and location of the original collection and that information is included in the observation (not when/where the observer took the image), the observation could reach Research Grade, correct?

[tiwane]

Yes, although iNat’s not really a repository for collections unless they’re your own collections. Places like GBIF or IDigBio are better for digitized institutional collections. iNat observations should be about your personal encounters with organisms.

[norm_shea]

@tiwane

Yes, although iNat’s not really a repository for collections unless they’re your own collections.

Got it, makes sense, thanks!

[paul_dennehy]

I had posted a topic about this question a while ago, but I can’t find it now. Basically I have a large personal moth collection, and I uploaded a bunch of it to inat, since it’s my own collection and I collected about 99% of the specimens from the wild myself. But that other 1% is specimens which are in my collection but were given to me by other collectors. The conclusion from that discussion was that even those specimens in my own collection that I didn’t encounter in the wild myself shouldn’t be uploaded, as the encounter did not occur between the user (me) and the wild organism. I’d already uploaded a few of them and didn’t bother to delete them, but I didn’t upload any more of those. So even if the taxidermy specimen has available data stating where and when it was found in the wild, if the inat user was not present at that date and time during the encounter, it should not be uploaded as an observation.