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!

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 whi…

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 observ…

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.

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.…

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 …

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 …

Is growth in set agar wild or cultivated?

General

AdamWargon January 13, 2026, 1:32am 2

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/are-culture-based-observations-considered-wild/

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Is growth in set agar wild or cultivated?

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