Hello everyone,
I found a spider in my car, took a picture of it and added it on the website, but as I am travelling quite a lot with the car, the locality does not really mean anything, since the spider could have entered the car anywhere.
What do you think, should we avoid making this kind of observation?
it’s an odd one, but if the spider got in on its own, as a potential disperal event, i think it’s fine to map where you saw it.
If i find a tick on me and know where it got on me i map to that location, but otherwise, i can map to my house or whatever since that’s where the tick got on its own (and hopefully was promptly removed and disposed of)
I’m not sure if iNat has an official stance on this, but I’m a firm believer in mapping observations where they actually are–human-transported or not. But it’s good to include a note in the observation if you think it was transported by people. Such observations can be useful for monitoring the spread of taxa into new regions, assessing possible source populations, etc. I humbly suggest that mapping the reality of where organisms are now is a more useful function of citizen/community science than trying to maintain tidy maps of where we think organisms ought to be.
Alright, thank you for your answers! I will add a note to my observation to indicate that I found it in a car.
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