Long-Term Observation of a Pond Water Community: Casual or Not?

It’s interesting seeing all the different opinions. I think one of the issues is that we’re trying to fit observations of all organisms into a very arbitrary black-or-white category whose entire purpose is about how we’ll use information rather than about describing any objective property of the organism itself. There are dozens of different degrees of “captivity” or “wildness”, and a Paramecium swimming through some muddy water has no clue whether it is “captive” or “wild”. I think the ideal solution would be to have at least one middle ground category between captive/cultivated and “wild”. For example, having a category like “collected” or “sampled”? would allow some flexibility for scenarios like these. Those observations could be clearly marked so that the time/location would count as research grade (as they provide accurate and meaningful data about an organism’s presence in a particular location at a particular time), but attributes such as life stage and phenology would not be included.

Since no such category exists yet, I think the best solution is to keep them as research grade but to just make a note in the description and to not add any annotations. While I think that jwidness’ “appearance test” makes sense for things like insect larvae or other large macroscopic things, it doesn’t for entire groups of organisms. For example, tardigrades are commonly studied by gathering dried moss or lichen which contain the dormant stages, and deliberately inducing an “appearance” change by bringing them out of dormancy. You really CAN’T study many tardigrades in any meaningful way without doing that. Should nearly all data from an entire phylum of animals be discarded simply because an “appearance” change is inherent to study them adequately? What about organisms which need to be cultured to even be identified (bacteria come to mind, but that even applies to macro organisms like gall-forming insects or parasitoids)? Some even need to be reared to a reproductive state (a LOT of microorganisms fall into this category)? Besides, another major purpose of iNat is to encourage people’s curiosity and engagement with the natural world, and having observations marked as casual can be discouraging.

So, long story short, I think the captive/wild category should be flexible, particularly with regards to taxonomic group. In the case of most small pond life (excluding things like insects, amphibians, etc), I think long-term observations of the community should count as “wild” as long as the sampling date/location are used, and a note is given in the description. IMO, we are in desperate need for those types of observations. For example- I added two Chlorella observations yesterday, and that was enough to get me in a tie as the top observer of this ubiquitous genus of algae that is found in probably almost every pond/ditch and in some marine habitats! that’s frankly absurd and really sad. I’m also the one and only observer of a couple of other less glamorous organisms, but I’m not sure how common those are.

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