In this observation, an out-or-range occurrence is explicitly due to human transport of a larval food plant, nicely documented in the comments with the observation. I used the DQA “Captive/cultivated” to mark this occurrence as human-aided. Is this the appropriate notation? IMHO, a simple annotation as “human-aided” would leave an occurrence like this open to becoming RG which seems inappropriate for such occurrences–quite analogous to garden plants or zoo animals.
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I also wasn’t sure what to do with that one. They did deliberately bring the lichen with them from another location, and then found that it had a lichen moth attached. I’m not sure if that’s a “hitchhiker” or not. Like if I brought a mushroom in from the woods, could I annotate the springtails and other bugs in the mushroom as being wild in my house because the mushroom was the organism I was trying to move, rather than the bugs on it? I think captive is the right call, but this one was definitely a borderline case. I could see someone making the argument that it’s analogous to a bug hitchhiking on produce, but I see taking a wad of lichen from the woods as a much more deliberate movement of wildlife. If grabbing a wad of dirt from another state, throwing it on my porch, and then searching through it for organisms means I can count them as wild because I only deliberately moved the dirt and didn’t look for the organisms in it before moving it, I’ve found a loophole that could massively boost my “yard list”. lol
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Though perhaps the technical definition is not “captive” or “cultivated”, I tend to think of what these research grades are used for. Often times, they will be used for species distribution models and establish climatic tolerances, to for example figure out how species will respond to climate change. For that reason, I prefer to treat them as “captive/cultivated” because they create an anomalous datapoint to understand distribution in relation to climatic tolerance.
There’s an interesting ongoing argument about this with regards to greenhouse weeds, which are plants that can become terribly invasive in greenhouses, and are hard to control. So hardly captive or cultivated, technically speaking. See for example this observation of a fork fern.
But there is an even greyer area, of organisms that have established themselves thanks to human infrastructure, but still out in the elements, like this one on the D.C. subway. I tend to think of those “human-aided” observations as legitimate, as long as they are growing wild and outdoors.
Anyway, it’s an interesting discussion!
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I think this will be resolved when/if the establishment annotations for reptiles and a few other taxa are adopted more broadly. The organism is not established in that location, but it most certainly doesn’t qualify for iNaturalist’s definitions of captive or cultivated.
Any researcher who blindly uses iNat data for models without checking the outliers is probably not going to produce quality research regardless of whether this specific observation was “verifiable” or “casual.”
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I agree with that, but it’s possible to reduce the room for error on both sides of the research: the input side and the utilization side. I, for one, vet the data carefully when performing species distribution modeling, and a tropical plant growing in Pennsylvania is easy to catch. However, it becomes more complicated with cultivated observations that at least fall within the native range. We’re also often talking about thousands of observations: vetting them individually is a monstrous task. Thus, I think it’s best to vet observations both when they are just created as well as when a researcher wants to use them, and work towards a better research “product” as a community :)
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Oh, yes, absolutely, and I’ve marked tens of thousands of cultivated observations as cultivated for that reason. My point is that we shouldn’t mark non-captive observations as captive/cultivated simply because they occur outside of the natural range (which I think you agree with).
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Definitely agree with that!
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I’ve wondered the same for observations of insects picked out of automobile grilles, which often show up far out of range for the species, and for insects transported in root balls of ornamental trees and shrubs. It seems logical to me in both cases to tick the Captive/Cultivated box…in each case, the organism was “captured” by human activity (though not intentionally) and moved by human means.
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But that’s one of the ways invasive species arrive. For example I am thinking of the box tree moth Cydalima perspectalis and the palm weevil Rhynchophorus ferrugineus.
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Clearly wild, it did not end up at this location by human intention.
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This has been discussed before, and iNaturalist’s position is that these are not captive/cultivated. The only things that are captive/cultivated are organisms that humans intended it to be there. What does captive / cultivated mean? : iNaturalist Help
The terms “captive” and “cultivated” are iNaturalist jargon explicitly meaning “intended by humans to be in that place.” We can’t wordsmith our way around that by saying that the organism was “captured” by a grille, no matter how strong the urge to make the range map “right.” I feel it, too. But since iNaturalist has been kind enough to host millions of photos, I think it’s only fair that we play by their rules, even if we have personal disagreements.
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I guess this is a very gray one with multiple ways to look at it.
The way I see it and the way I would do this type of observation:
- Pictures and observations of the caterpillar at the time/location it was found on the lichen - marked WILD with notes indicating the recent shipment and other pertinent info.
- Pictures of the butterfly/moth taken “now” (ie after it had a chance to undergo metamorphosis and emerge) - marked CAPTIVE as it was kept on purpose possibly for days/weeks (assuming it’s not kept for rehab & release purpose)
Thankfully, these cases are not too common!
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Thanks @natev for that link. I’m on a fence in this particular complicated observation. Here is my thinking on this sequence of actual/potential events: Had the larva been documented at its original location in Texas, it would clearly be wild. IF the larva had been transported intentionally to PA just to ID it, then the location where it was identified (i.e. PA) is irrelevant and the observation should be placed at its Texas origin. However, if the lichen moth larva was not intentionally brought from Texas to Pennsylvania but was a hitchhiker, I think an argument can be made that the larva–but not the adult moth–should be a wild occurrence, even though human aided. Now to the adult moth: IF the moth was only discovered as an adult and it is a presumption (a good one) that the larvae arrived in PA by accident on some lichen, then I think it’s still a wild hitchhiker. The final complexity is IF the hitchhiking larva was recognized in its larval state only in PA, then retained, allowed to pupate, and emerged as an adult moth in PA, I would make an argument that the adult moth should be marked as “captive” because it was explicitly retained until the time of emergence to get an ID for the (former) larva.
Can we make this any more complicated?? ;-)
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I agree with this reasoning (I think! It’s a lot). But in general, hitchhikers brought unintentionally would be wild. In general, if any organism changes a life stage while/after being in human care/captivity, the “new” life stage of the organism will be captive and not wild.
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This exact issue has been an ongoing debate that flares up maybe once or twice a year. The staff has been using reptiles to pilot a way to mark such things as not captive but not established: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/91460-piloting-an-establishment-annotation-with-amphibians-and-reptiles.
I’d just mark it not captive for now.
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This discussion has helped clarify the Captive/Cultivated designation for me. I don’t see much difference between the hitchhiker on the lichen and an insect in a root ball, so based on the other points raised in the discussion, it follows that they’d both be considered wild (but hopefully in the near future, could be marked as “not established”).
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And also that the reared-out adult would be considered captive (I forgot to add that earlier).
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Captive vs. wild – the only DQA topic for which every conceivable edge case has to have an entire Forum thread.
Probably because iNaturalist uses the term “wild” in a way which few others uses it. In this case, it’s a moth that was transported by mail, then held captive in a cage, but considered wild. I think that changing the terminology would go a long way towards clearing up these debates.
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It’s wild for our purposes. Humans didn’t intend to transport it, though they did intentionally transport its home.
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