https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/342617728
I bought a package of wakame which turned out to have a piece of what appears to be a different kind of seaweed in it. It’s currently marked “location inaccurate”. I checked mitoku.com and found that it could have been grown in Ise or Hokkaido, which are at least a megameter apart (except maybe the southwest corner of Hokkaido). Should I place a circle which includes both, or leave the location in Asheville where I bought it?
I’ve previously found a maggot and seeds in lettuce, and marked the location where I bought the lettuce, but it was most likely grown in America, not Japan.
This is like the (sometimes interminable) discussions about ship-assisted bird records. My take is that the location of your interaction with the algae in the package would be the place of observation, but since this is a human-produced commercial product and so “derived”–i.e. removed from a natural setting–that I would mark it as casual, the same as a zoo or botanical garden specimen. Taken to absurd length, would I want to upload an image of the freeze-dried strawberries in my Special K Redberry or the raisins in my Raisin Bran?
Give the location as the place you bought it. Mark it as captive - the only reason it is there is because a human intended it to be there. This isn’t some organism that hitchhiked or snuck in under its own power, every single step of its journey was due to deliberate human action.