Hi all! My apologies if this has already been covered, I couldn’t find anything answering my question in the forums.
If I were to take a swab of let’s just say, a doorknob, and wipe it in nutrient rich agar in a petri dish, could I upload what grows as wild, or would it be cultivated?
Thanks!
The culture grown in the dish is cultivated, but the bacteria on the doorknob for which the culture is evidence of were wild. Whether your observation is labelled wild or cultivated depends on which of those contexts you use the date and location of. Either way include the full details in the observation description to explain to anyone coming across it later.
Yes, very good summary. I would also suggest casting a preemptive “Wild” vote if you do the observation for the doorknob date/time as many will assume cultivated.
I think the issue with that solution in the linked thread (which I would disagree with to some extent) is that there is potentially is a meaningful difference in life stage between fungal spores and other stages/types of fungal growth. For the OP’s scenario above, I was envisioning bacteria (for which life stages aren’t much of an issue), but reading it again, I realize the organism isn’t specified. I think if you have a cultivated organism in a different life stage from the original observation, it becomes much harder to justify an observation as “wild” just by setting the date/time/location to capture. For instance, if you post an observation of an adult butterfly from a caterpillar that you captured and hatched to ID, you shouldn’t make the adult observation wild (or backdate it). It needs to be captive and referenced by a wild observation of the caterpillar. This is a little weirder to do with a culture plate but a potentially meaningful different depending on the organism.
If the observation is for the agar plate itself, that’s obviously cultivated. But if it’s for the door knob and the agar plate is used as evidence, I can see an argument for wild. In this case, it’s just a difference in framing and intent, but other situations might make the difference more obvious. I think there are some microbes (and fungi) that can be identified by what media they do/do not grow on and what their colonies look like. Their ability to grow on a certain type of agar plate and the appearance of their colonies really might be the best way to detect and identify them. It seems like that’s valid evidence of a wild organism, especially for those that don’t have an identifiable macroscopic form and can’t easily be detected by other more direct means. At the very least, the location should match the place where the sample was taken, not just the location where the plates were incubated, and there should be either a photo or description of the environment it came from and the media it’s growing on.
I will say it irks me when someone collects a mushroom that can be easily identified, like a chanterelle or morel, grows it on a plate, and posts only a picture of the plate (or makes the photo of the plate the first photo). It seemly like a needlessly indirect way to make an observation. Kind of like how microscopy of spores viewed at home can help to ID something, but it would be dumb (in my opinion) to make an observation where a microscopic image of a spore was the first or only photo, particularly if that wasn’t necessary or sufficient for an ID and other more important details were missing.
One follow-up question I still don’t know the answer to: There was an observer who posted an observation of a cultured morel on an agar plate (no photos of the morel, just the fuzz on the plate). It was verified by sequencing, so the ID wasn’t in question. The location that showed up was a lab, but the notes said “cultured from the mushroom in this observation:” with a link to an observation from a different person at a different location that showed the wild mushroom in its actual habitat. I marked it cultivated and commented to tell them it was really cool, but obviously not wild. They quietly counter-voted and marked it as wild. Did I take the correct action in this case, or should I have instead marked “location incorrect” and asked them to change it to the site of the find?
There was some good discussion about more complicated situations in this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/long-term-observation-of-a-pond-water-community-casual-or-not/11381/20
I once took a jar of water and leaf litter and debris from a vernal pool and watched it at home for a few weeks. I could find and photograph most of the organisms immediately after the dust settled so this question didn’t make much difference. But after a few days the aquatic isopods died and a parasitic worm came out of one of them. The worm was in the vernal pool and that might be interesting information to someone (a researcher was interested in a hydra from the same jar), but it was only the artificial conditions that enabled me to see it. 
This kind of touches on the problem of whether “organism” or “individual” is even a meaningful unit of measurement at that small scale. Back in my microbio class we avoided those words altogether and used “colony forming unit” (CFU) for any sort of quantitative analyses. One colony generally counts as evidence of presence for one CFU.
In my opinion, it is better to go by practical usefulness rather than following policy to the letter. iNat’s guidelines were never intended for this kind of observation, so I think they should have little jurisdiction here. For practical purposes, an observation should be allowed to reach RG if it satisfies the standards of sampling and identification of whichever particular field it would fall into. And cultivating and isolating colonies is essential for morphological or biochemical identification.
It would be ironic that following more or less standard research procedure would prevent an observation from reaching research grade.
(That being said, I think whether these observations reach RG or not is pretty irrelevant from a data-quality POV for various reasons. Most cannot be IDed to species or even genus, so they probably never become RG anyway, and I don’t think iNat is used much by researchers for data on these organisms)