I know that intellectually, but I have been surprised that I have a visceral negative reaction (a mental “wince”) when I see these. In contrast, other dead insects in photos don’t bother me much. Brains are weird!
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I also have a ‘mental wince’ when I see pinned insects. It just seems these days that non-human life is so endangered that killing one to identify it seems unnecessary.
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- I’m strongly against the proposal, but I understand there’s strong feelings for a portion of users (percentage for/against might be something worth assessing–does iNat do site-wide polls for experimental/new feature introductions?
If some type of filter were to be enacted through an opt-in would make more sense, as part of new users’ introduction (maybe with examples/preferences like dead non-vertebrates, non-herps OK, or check-boxes for what’s acceptable dead).
Established users could have an option to opt-in as a new feature (how that gets communicated is another issue). Maybe a sample pixelated view of a mammal photo tagged as dead, with a roll-over option to view/opt-out of the feature? There could even be a third option where people decide how they’re feeling day-to-day (let me decide each day) or an “I’m eating lunch” option?
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Again, I think it’d be worth getting a non-biased assessment of user opinions here, are new users being turned off, or is this anecdotal and not a real issue for the great majority of new users? Not saying either way, just seems data should drive these sorts of site-wide decisions.
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In my personal experience, I remember being a bit shocked/disgusted by some of the particularly graphic roadkill images, but strangely fascinated by the visceral nature of the images at the same time, since it’s usually something you only see at highway speeds. After 5-10 of these types of images I was no longer bothered, death and gore is a part of nature, our opinions should take a backseat to representing, seeing, and documenting that reality (in my opinion).
At the same time, I know everyone’s different, so it would be interesting to see how this could be implemented in a way that respected others’ personal preferences, while allowing for the option to take a dip in the shallow-end, so to speak, and desensitize in the interest of pushing personal boundaries, and/or learning about the ‘other’ side of life.
- Last thing I’ll say, aside from the above points, I believe seeing and emotional reaction are a large part of how we as humans make memories, judgments, and decisions, therefore, effectively censoring these observations for people would impact how people view reality and leave a sanitized version which, while more comfortable, does not reflect reality.
In my view, this is harmful for many reasons, one of which would be decreasing the outreach/educational value of iNaturalist to the public, as a policy, such as wildlife crossings under highways and reduced wildlife corridor speeds, for example, cost money and political capital to implement, and without people being made aware of the issue, it’s less likely to have as strong a public backing it might otherwise have.
As an example, the Newt Roadkill projects [1] [2] have been effectively and systematically documenting thousands of newt kills, resulting in extensive local media coverage [1] [2] [3]. As a project, they’ve been advocating for changes to infrastructure which are currently being weighed, without this project, there probably wouldn’t be a review since the process is largely political in nature.
The same is true for more charismatic species like Mountain Lions as well, which have had a 58% decline in mountain lion roadkill over the pandemic period due to reduced traffic, these are avoidable deaths that will return when we get back to ‘normal’ which require public awareness at some level, which is greatly dulled by this proposal.
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Suppose you want to study or describe the phenology of a given insect species, you want to be able to use the date at which specimens of the species were observed. In this case, you would probably remove the dead specimens from your analysis, because dead specimens could have been there for who knows how long. It could be a wasp that died between two windows many moons ago. Or some dead beetle along a sidewalk. In this case, the date of the observation cannot be used to determine when a species is active in a given area and anybody looking at phenology of the species would probably remove observations marked as dead prior to analysis. Hence, flagging pinned specimens as dead when the date reflects the time of collection will probably render these observations useless for anything related to the study of phenology. To me, the “dead” annotation refers to the moment when the observation was made and I assume that was the intention when this annotation was created by iNat (but I could be wrong). Otherwise, I don’t see any use to this annotation (besides possibly flagging potentially disturbing photos). The “dead” annotation could be used to spot sensitive content, but I think a different annotation/flag would be needed for that, one that does not concern the state of the specimen at the moment of the observation (like juvenile, eggs, larva, etc.), but that concerns the nature of the content.
(post was slightly edited)
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Shades of grey…
Dead is not alive. Using the dead annotation to avoid potentially objectionable content is a workaround at best… The dead annotation was not (imo) created specifically for that purpose.
As to who applies a POC flag?.. Anyone who thinks it might be potentially objectionable to someone else. And for those that make the argument that potential objectors could still encounter POC prior to it being flagged, well… if they are spared exposure to 90% of POC then it’s better than status quo, and if the remaining 10% is sufficiently detrimental, then they could proactively set date filters that stop them seeing anything for a week after it is uploaded, by which time I would imagine that someone will have applied the flag. It’s a two way street here, we are looking for a community solution to this, and it is not unreasonable to expect some effort from the potential objectors…
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That is interesting, would you say this reaction is changing over time ± or it’s stable and how/if seeing them more often affect it?
As someone with quite a few of them on the wall and gathering hardest ones for id, I can’t relate, I find insect intestines pretty disgusting (plus some have awful smell) unlike chitinized parts that are just beautiful for me, saved for many decades from becoming nothing.
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I am weird among collectors, I haven’t killed a single specimen. I keep them all in large cages as pets until they die, then I pin them. I can’t ethically kill one for some reason.
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you are not so weird, in that you have a good understanding of your own moral position on the ethical considerations here, and that itself is a common trait amongst us all (I think so, at least)…
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Back before I was an active iNat user I was only using the iPhone app, which doesn’t show/have annotations. There is no way to add them upon upload or afterwards. It’s not that I couldn’t be arsed to add annotations, I just didn’t know they existed! It wasn’t until a year after I made my account that I ever logged into the desktop version and discovered the whole wonderous world beyond the iOS iNat app…
Point being, if we were serious about wanting more posts to have annotations, that aspect of the iOS app should probably be updated.
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What irritates me is that they aren’t available on the website upload page either. I was going to annotate all my observations a while back, but going through them on the Identify page was so slow and when I realized that I’d have to do it all over again every time I added more I just gave up. Why does the uploader allow you to add tags and fields (to me, less useful than annotations) but not annotations?!
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On the other hand, at any time when insects are alive, there are probably other individuals around that are dead. So I don’t see how marking pinned insects as dead would matter. (I’m not advocating it, I just don’t see that it matters.)
I intended no offence. I was referring to folks who should know better, or at least who should make an attempt. From what I know, the life-cycle stage is the most important for the AI (please anyone correct me if I’m wrong). If you do not know about annotations, ignore my comment.
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Oh, I didn’t take personal offense! Mostly just playing off your choice of words to illustrate my point that many users don’t know about annotations to begin with, complicating the concept of using that tool to blur dead observations.
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Fields are used by projects, so they can be much more useful than annotations.
Okay, I know that, but the amount and messiness of them makes them suitable for nothing other than traditional projects and personal organization. As I said, they are to me less useful - I know they have some uses. But the point I was trying to make was that if tags and fields can be added during upload, why not annotations?
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I don’t have that much of an opinion on this - I mostly stick to my own observations, in part because of this issue. But I would very much like to never see something rotting again. I know where meat comes from and how it works, but I do my best on other parts of the Internet to avoid seeing rotting flesh. (The Wikipedia article on “gangrene”, for example, is something I try not to look at because the images are very unpleasant for me.)
Even knowing that it was imperfect and based on “please use life-stage identifiers to indicate if your observation is a dead animal”, I’d find it helpful to apply some sort of blur or filter.
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I’m not an authority on this subject, but my thinking was that the website uploader includes a sidebar which has the option to batch-edit observations. Tags, fields, and projects can be added to any observation, however annotations are contingent on the taxa, and cannot be batch-edited the same way. I agree this is frustrating, and a big contributor to why many of my observations are not fully annotated with dead/alive, flowering, etc. Making it easier to annotate, esp on uploading observations would probably be a first step toward having a system to filter dead animals. As others have pointed out, there are still a huge number of dead observations that have yet to be annotated.
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If you apply the right fields, then the annotations auto-populate with taxa appropriate values. Most instances of fields that have an annotation equivalent are linked, but if you encounter any that you think should be you can contact staff with the details, and if they agree they link them for future use.
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I’ve posted some really gross roadkill. Maybe that’s why I’m concerned about finding ways to make the first photo non-gross. Also flies on gross carcasses, though I try to crop out the worst.
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I never knew this! Thanks for that tip, I tried it today, and it worked perfectly.
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