Humans are introduced by human means!
Was this always a thing? Only now have I seen this.
Maybe not appropriate for the platform, but damn thatās funny! They arenāt wrong, mind you. 
11 Likes
Apparently, Humans are considered native to Africa, Asia, Oceania, South America, and even Antarctica and Greenland, but not North America or Europe.
Itās quite tempting to interpret this as some kind of a satirical jokeā¦ 
5 Likes
But still, even a human in one of the places where they, sorry we, are considered native, would be introduced by human means, right?
5 Likes
Evolutionarily speaking: no, not really.
1 Like
the simple answer is that users can add any taxon to checklists for places and add establishment means for them. In this regard, Homo sapiens is no different to any other taxon in iNat, and it can be added to any checklist and have its establishment means edited. This is what has happened here in all the cases mentioned, and you can see who made the addition by checking each checklist. So for eg Poland like in OPās screenshot, it is because a number of years ago, a particular user added the species to the Poland checklist, and then explicitly set the establishment means to introduced.
perhaps staff could ālockā Homo sapiens from being added to place checklists
4 Likes
Thatās pretty funny. I canāt imagine a situation where humans arrived anywhere aside from anthropogenic means. Maybe extreme weather, or being picked up by a large animal.
7 Likes
I knew about the checklist thing, I used it to mark a bunch of Hawaiian land snail spp. as endemic.
I never thought about adding humans to the checklist though XD
Yeah, but we still end up in a particular place because of human, self, intervention.
Iād say humans should get 3 or 4 exclamation marks, because theyāre worse than any knotweed or wild carrot Iāve ever seen.
Itās so fun talking about my own species in the 3rd person.
6 Likes
I would count humans as introduced naturally where we migrated voluntarily, and introduced by anthropogenic means where we were forced to migrate by slave trade, war, or the like.
1 Like
What sense does this make?
1 Like
That means that just about every place on earth is a mixture of naturally occurring and anthropogenically introduced people.
2 Likes
That may be only because our impacts have been recent enough to be more fully documented. If you think about South America as a continent that once had many marsupials, and then Panama appeared and allowed North American placentals to self-introduce, that was likely ecologically equivalent to the situation with our species.
1 Like
None at all - it just so happens that users have set the establishment means of Homo sapiens for some places in North America and Europe, but not the other places I listed (at the last time I looked, anyway). As suggested in the solution, this setting should be disabled for the Homo sapiens, as the taxon is generally treated as a special case on iNaturalist (e.g. itās excluded from the default filters).
2 Likes
For humans itās a bit different. You only get marked āintroducedā if you have stated your name and purpose or have gotten someone to do it for you. :P
4 Likes
Humans are arguably both native and introduced to every place they occur, as they got thir under their own power, but their own power is still anthropogenic means.
5 Likes
Yes, only exception I can think of would be a small island that someone/s were intentionally marooned on by others (or maybe unintentionally wrecked on/transported to via weather).
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.