Now THAT’S a t-shirt I would buy.
(My apologies, I couldn’t resist. Please return to your serious discussion.)
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Good question, and to be honest I’m not sure about good stats for all insects. In my world (robber flies) the vast majority are obviously live shots, especially for the taxa most people encounter. I just skimmed through the last 1056 observations globally to get a sense and only 2% were obviously dead specimens. Dead photos become more common for rare taxa, when people like me have been adding photos of cool things we’ve collected so they’re better represented on the web. And sometimes you can’t really tell a difference-- I’ve often posted photos where I’m holding a fly in my fingers and it could be either freshly post-mortum from the kill jar or catch-and-release.
Thankfully this is very taxon dependent and often no biggie. About the only color difference that I’ve seen happen with robber flies is the eye color might change from vivid green or purple to flat black, but that only occurs with a small handful of genera. Other groups like aquatics, dragonflies, and some beetles have more of a problem with cuticle color fading.
A related issue might be the shape distortions that dead specimens can have-- a few groups (ahem, Empidoidea flies) are prone to imploding heads when they dry out, and the wing position you get when you’ve pinned many insects can be rather different from how they look sitting on a leaf.
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Happens in many Hymenoptera, especially bees. Kind of disappointing when comparing live photos to pinned specimens.
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I have to disagree with the apparent majority opinion. I couldn’t label a pinned specimen any other than dead when all I have is a photo. If only the observer can make the decision, why is it an annotation that anyone can select? An observer can always add a comment to their observation. - The fact is that extremely few observers use annotations (or comments with such info)!
Following other discussions, I thought I learned that location and time information describe the photo location and time. Removing a specimen from the location of capture before taking photos means that location and time information are not for the live observation. What about having photos as evidence of an observation?
No, date and time are those of when one met the alive insect, otherwise it would be labelled as captive or marked date/location wrong.
Just the fact that you can add annotation doesn’t mean you should annotate differently when you know for a fact this likely was met alive. You can just skip that observation, it’s not like ading annotations is forced upon users, creating a dilemma. Plus you have a response from the site staff.
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Users can manually set the date/time of an observation to that of a live capture/encounter even if a photo was not taken exactly then, and that is what many do. So the time of the photo, often, but does not always, correspond to the time of the observation. If users collect plant samples, or insects to be chilled or pinned, they are often photographed up to a couple of days after the actual encounter, and this is ok as long as the date/time and location are set to that when the organism was originally encountered and the organism hasn’t changed in some significant way since then (like an adult emerging from a pupa or something).
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I would also buy that t-shirt!
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Hello everyone,
Thank you very much for your comments. There are several that directly answer my question and others open up new topics. I want to better focus my question by explaining why.
I have a project on urban wildlife mortality
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mortalidad-de-vida-silvestre-en-lima-y-callao-peru
My interest with this project is to obtain information on species mortality, but also to detect occurrences of abnormalities in species mortality. For this project, the results to date are satisfactory, because currently they allow observing abnormal mortality patterns for a bird (you can see it by reviewing the project statistics).
Interested in knowing the impact in the country due to avian influenza, I have created a project for the country
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/peru-mortalidad-de-vida-silveste
My problem is that I have found numerous records of preserved specimens that are listed as dead. For example
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/105605166
My criteria is that:
- If the animal is found alive and collected for preservation, the animal was found alive and I think it should be noted as alive in the observation.
- If the animal was found dead and collected for preservation, then it should be recorded as dead.
- If the animal is found in a collection of preserved specimens, and you dont know the condition at the first encounter, then, don’t annotate this status.
In this way it will be possible to have entered the observations with annotations that really correspond to the objective of the project.
In my case, to solve the problem in the Peru project, I have excluded the observations of specific users. The problem that can occur, is that all the observations of the specific users are excluded, even if there are some that are correct to include.
I think this clarifies my problem.
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I edited the above post because it referred to excluding the observations of a specific user. However, the forum isn’t a place for calling out specific users, and I think the explanation of the issue is clear without the reference to the user.
I think the criteria here are good guidelines for how to annotate observations of preserved specimens.
If you think a specimen hasn’t been annotated correctly, the only way to currently correct it is to get a user to remove their initial annotation so it can be changed. You can vote against the annotation, but this doesn’t change it. I would suggest mentioning the user making the annotation in a comment and asking them to explain and/or change their annotation politely. You could include a link to this forum discussion. It is a fine point, so a lot of users may not understand why this way of annotating is appropriate. However, there’s no guarantee the user would agree and/or respond, and this is somewhat time intensive.
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