And it might become less common when prospective murderers study this case for pointers. As this case has shown, murder by mushroom is not a very good method. It’s not fast enough, so the victim has time to tell doctors and police what he has eaten and where.
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I would think would be more difficult to find specific local locations of death caps, or funeral bells, in a facebook group. There are only two Funeral bell G. marginata reports in my state of WA, and a 100 or so in Victoria, with the closest being a 45min drive from where the death cap family lunch took place.
Thanks for sharing!
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My first thought on this was title a joke?
I mean seriously, iNat was not the source of the mushrooms.
We are not a supplier of anything but information.
I think the information is important for knowing what mushrooms to leave alone. We can’t predict who is going to misuse this.
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I came to the forum to see if this article was being discussed, particularly wanted to hear @thebeachcomber 's thoughts on it. A bit off-topic, but while overall a positive article, did you find some of the examples a little odd (cats vs koalas meaning to illustrate a skewed dataset)?
Back on topic, at least in Canberra I know the local government places large signs up in the exact areas where death caps are known to grow to advise people they are poisonous and not to pick and eat any mushrooms. It is an important educative and risk mitigative strategy and the signs are written in multiple languages. If they were removed to avoid encouraging deliberate poisoning, would there be a spike in accidental poisonings?
Overall I still personally think obscuring by some degree could be sensible. But I don’t think the case actually demonstrated (yet?) that the accused accessed iNaturalist, just a correlation in locations visited.
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Mushrooms would be last on my list of “convenient options for murder”
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to expand on my brief comments very early in the thread, I personally agree with the sentiments of most of the other commenters in this thread. I think there’s been a kneejerk reaction to this case and a dose of understandable, but unnecessary overcaution. If people really want to find things like deathcaps, there are many easy ways to do so without even needing iNat at all, so I think iNat is being used as a convenient scapegoat.
(and as you say, I don’t think it’s even been conclusively proven yet)
I think the Canberra signs are an interesting one, and I reckon they’re actually a net positive in that situation as, again, if people really wanted to find them anyway, they would. So I think some warnings that maybe will make people think twice about the consequences are probably a good thing.
Broadly, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of biodiversity data platforms and aggregators to obscure locations of anything and everything that could maybe be actively used for harm, and that obscuration should be focused on reducing the risks of poaching/collection/disturbance of truly sensitive and threatened taxa.
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I admit I’m not familiar with the details in this case but it sounds like user action based on iNat activity is suggested as evidence to argue for intent (foraging for deadly mushrooms) and counter the defense that they were accidentally purchased without intent to harm anyone. iNat isn’t on trial here, it’s just used as sort of a digital fingerprint to connect the dots and maybe help make a case.
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I expect that the prosecution will try to show that she checked iNat specifically for death cap locations and then drove a considerable distance to gather them rather than checking iNat for locations of edible species closer to her home.
No blame can be attached to iNat or to the people who reported observations of death cap mushrooms.
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I wonder about her side of the story. If. If she deliberately killed 3 family members - why?
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iNaturalist is the alledged source of the location of the mushrooms.
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Yes it will be interesting what the prosecution says on this, so far only very basic details have been given. The trial is still in progress and may continue for a number of weeks. Part of the allegations include that she drove to the locations of Outtrim and Loch the day after iNaturalist reports were uploaded of Death cap mushrooms in these areas. She may have been ‘Following’ reports of this species. I am sure that iNat would have it in their terms & conditions that eating, taking, disturbing or using reported organisms as a murder weapon is against the policies and intended use of the app and website.
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- Inappropriate Use. You agree not to use the Platform, the iNaturalist Services, or any iNaturalist Content for any illegal, unlawful, or unauthorized purpose or activity, including but not limited to threatening, abusing, soliciting, spam, harassing, stalking, impersonating, or intimidating other iNaturalist Users.
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I was thinking should iNat have an automatic “toxic”, “poisonous” or “do not consume” tag or icon like it does for introduced species? But probably not.
Currently the following user generated “Observation fields” exist: “Toxic to people”, “Toxicity” and a number of “Edible” or “Edible parts” fields.
No, because that could imply iNat is responsible for providing that information. It decidedly is not.
iNat is not a guide to gathering foods nor a shield to protect users from ingesting things that could harm them or others.
iNaturalist is a lot of different things, but at its core, iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature
It’s also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool.
source
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This idea has been discussed on the forum in some threads before and generally rejected by staff. You can see some of these here (but I think there are more):
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/labels-for-poisonous-toxic-on-inat/7258
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-foragable-or-edible-plants-search-option/6089
Also, FYI, you can respond to multiple people/put multiple quotes in one post by highlighting and selecting “quote”. This helps keeps thread cleaner/easier to read than making a string of posts from one person.
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Allegedly. The court case is not over.
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Next episode in one sentence. Mushroom expert guilty of posting obs of poisonous mushrooms on iNat.
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Uh oh. It was funkeytom in the outback with a mushroom.
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Lots of mentions and display of people’s iNat observations of various fungi in the trial today, as Dr Tom May (funkeytom) continues his evidence.