Is there any possible utility for observations of cultivated crops or harvested products photographed in a market/at home?

I agree with your first point, but I’d like to push back against all the other people piling on to say it’s obviously wild. Yes, this is how some pests get introduced to new areas (I teach whole lectures about this in my classes) but it’s not always that cut and dried. The armoured scale insect I found on a supermarket orange in snowy Utah last month is a good example of how the system isn’t set up in a way that accomodates supermarket hitchhikers very well: the insect didn’t live in Utah, its sedentary body was just trucked in the day before in an 18-wheeler full of fruit from thousands of miles away. It certainly couldn’t live “in the wild” if I left the orange with the scale unattended outside with a foot of snow on the ground. So having the species suddenly showing up on maps as “wild” and part of the January Utah fauna because of me posting that orange would mean something very different than if somebody actually found a colony living in their greenhouse or orchard. And that seems like a distinction worth keeping. I think I’d argue that since the substrate (the orange) was intentionally moved by humans, the hitchhiker should be treated as such, too, until they show evidence of actually living somewhere on their own.

3 Likes