Is taxidermy allowed?

General
1

Is it allowed to post taxidermied animals, from museum collections? In this case, I assume these posts must be marked as not wild, correct?

2

it’s technically allowed, but certainly discouraged; iNaturalist is meant to be for “individual encounters with nature”, and taxidermied animals are only borderline natural in most identifiers’ minds. I certainly see a number of museum specimens uploaded to iNaturalist but as you correctly suggest, they are to be marked as not wild. depending on the identifier, you may get some people marking that kind of specimen as “location inaccurate” or “date inaccurate” as well since the specimen was not originally found alive or dead at that place (e.g. a museum institution) or that time.
now, if you yourself taxidermied an animal and uploaded photos of the specimen with the date and location manually corrected to when you actually encountered the animal in nature, then that’s a different story and could be marked wild (as long as you specify what happened). however, the usual scenario of museum specimens doesn’t allow for wild status of the animal.

16 Likes
3

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-should-taxidermy-observations-be-treated/54987
Here is link to a past forum discussion

4 Likes
4

The other replies summarize it well, but if you’re looking for a way to log organisms you’ve seen at places like museums I recommend creating a list instead of uploading them as observations. For example, I have my own list: https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/4473560-Captive-Cultivated-Observations

1 Like
5

Thank you, but that’s not the case. I was identifying and found several posts of taxidermied animals, so I’d like to know how to deal with that.

1 Like
6

The previous replies already answered the question very well so I won’t needlessly reiterate what they have already said. The one thing I have seen sometimes that didn’t get brought up is people posting photos that were taken by the museum. It’s cool that they’re interested in knowing what they’re looking at but obviously this is not allowed since they don’t own the photo. I suspect you already know this, I just thought it was worth bringing attention to because I do occasionally see photos of museum specimens get posted by people who find them online.

1 Like
7

This is the most excellent advice I’ve ever seen given when people ask about sharing captive, museum etc observations for personal logging. Hadn’t even realise this could be an option.

Not so related to this, but obviously many people do want to do personal logging of sightings with captive, zoo, museum etc despite how discouraged it is on inat this makes good option.

1 Like
8

In case you end up deciding to post some taxidermy specimens, here is a project you can share them with: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/taxidermy-mounted-preserved-specimens

2 Likes
9

IDing an obs of taxidermy.
Dead.
Captive.
Location and date at the museum.
That observer at the museum is engaging with the ‘museum experience’ not the pre-taxidermy specimen.

Unless the obs is by the collector - with the date and location of collection. And we would still rather see the live / growing specimen before.

2 Likes
10

If the observation has the location and time where the animal was killed or found dead, this is more or less acceptable. It’s certainly acceptable if you are the person who killed/found it. If the location and/or date are where/when you photo’d the animal after it was mounted, that is a human production and should be marked in a way that will send it to Casual, perhaps by marking the location and/or date as inaccurate. If you want to get a lot of these taxidermied organisms on the internet, there are better websites for doing that.

1 Like
11

If the observer is the one who collected/killed/found the animal, then posting a taxidermy photo is perfectly fine, and it can even be RG if it’s marked with the date and location where it was originally found. If it’s someone else’s specimen/preparation, it can’t be RG, because
-the observer only encountered it at a location where a human put it (ie a museum), so entering that data makes the observation “captive”
-if the observer enters the date and location where it was taken from the wild, they weren’t present at that time and location, so it doesn’t meet iNat’s definition of an “observation” (ie an encounter between the observer and an organism)
That being said, as an identifier, I would certainly still attempt to ID the organism before marking it “captive”, as the person who posted it probably wants to know what it is, and I wouldn’t want to stifle their curiosity by jumping straight to rule enforcement without also helping them out. (think of the “compliment sandwich”- “what a neat creature, I’d say it’s a passenger pigeon- I’m marking it as captive because it’s not in the wild, but it’s still a cool thing to have seen!” as opposed to “this isn’t what iNat is for!”)

4 Likes
12

Why on earth would you want to do that? Surely to goodness, iNat is for recording living, wild species. Stuffed animals add nothing to the knowledge base of distribution etc,

13

I wouldn’t say they add nothing. There are cases where a taxidermied mount of an animal might be the only representative of that species from a particular area. I have photos (not on iNat) of taxidermied mammals that were the last documented from my state. They have date and location info. They’re hardly useless, just not exactly what iNat is for.

4 Likes
14

The original poster made clear that they were identifying observations and came across observations of taxidermied specimens. They are asking about how to deal with such observations when encountered during the activity of identification.

3 Likes
15

Dead organisms provide a lot of useful info too!

Taxidermy is extremely valuable in biology, taxonomy, genetics, and public education. It’s discouraged on iNat not because it’s useless, but because iNat is for an individual’s own interactions with nature.

4 Likes
16

I understand that. I’m a biologist myself. My point though is that taxidermy specimens (very useful in a museum) add nothing to the point of iNat - at least as I see it - of being a database to record the location and frequency of living specimens. Reporting stuffed animals is as useless in that regard as reporting domestic dogs and cats and creatures in zoos … all of which appear here. If it doesn’t add scientific information, what is the point?

2 Likes
17

It can happen that the taxidermied animal was posted with the date and place of collection. If so, it’s as useful as any other post with evidence of the organism at a given place and time. This is like the posting of road-killed animals. The location is where it was last alive, though it’s dead when photo’d.

2 Likes
18

Users upload observations for all sorts of reasons. Contributing to science may or may not be a motivation. They may be trying out the app to see what it can identify, using it to keep a personal record of something they found meaningful, they may just think the specimen is cool, etc. Engaging with nature is not necessarily identical to seeing oneself as participating in citizen science; it is likely that not all users are aware that their observations are even used for scientific research – at least at first (I hope that most users who stick around do eventually understand this).

There is no requirement that observations represent usable data points about the occurrence of wild specimens. Certain types of content are discouraged – nudging people towards observing some things and not others is one purpose of the grey “casual” label, though I suspect some portion of app users may never notice if their observations of cultivated plants are marked casual, or understand the implications when it happens – but observations are not removed if they do not meet the criteria for becoming RG.

3 Likes