If something is close to death (lying on the ground but still alive and slightly moving) should it be considered ‘Alive’ or ‘Dead’ in the observation fields? While it’s still technically alive, it’s kind of functionally dead if it can’t do anything but move its legs a little, so I’m not sure what to label it.
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Alive or Dead (within Animalia)
Alive: Organism is living and shows no signs of imminent death
Dead: Organism is dead or shows imminent signs of death
Cannot Be Determined: Cannot be determined from the evidence provided
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For annotations, it might help to mentally put yourself in the shoes of a researcher.
If you were studying this organism, what annotations would help you with your phenology studies, with your roadkill studies, etc.?
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Interesting question. How imminent is imminent. I’ve seen moths and butterflies surviving with half a wing ripped off, and snakes and turtles surviving with wounds that look deadly, but animals can be resilient.
I’ve been using Dead to mean Dead. /shrugs/
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If it’s a species way out of its usual range, and dying perhaps as a result (e.g. a tropical seabird on a northern European beach) I can maybe see the point of using “dead” for animals that are barely alive. In other situations, I’d be more inclined to mark a dying animal as alive, because it was alive when you found it. Of course, you can just leave it blank – when in doubt, that’s the best strategy.
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For giant silk moths, in which the adults have no mouths, a clearly dying adult is probably at its natural end-of-life; therefore annotating as “Dead” gives a clearer phenological picture. The same an be said for insects which do not naturally survive the winter, if observed dying at the end of the season.
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FWIW, I came up with the definition and the main use case I had in mind, which is unfortunately something I’ve seen too often, are snakes on roads that have been hit by cars and clearly mortally wounded but are not dead yet. Didn’t make sense to mark the animal as alive.
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Giant silk moths are exactly what came to mind when I read this topic title. Because they don’t feed as adults and they can never recover the Calories they burn as moths, they’re extremely reluctant to move around and fly when disturbed/handled in the daytime. The result is that I get messages on a regular basis from friends saying “I found this dying moth! It can barely move! What do I do?” and the image is of a perfectly healthy Saturniid flopping around helplessly on the ground because it’s not about to waste energy warming up its flight muscles in the middle of the daytime. So I imagine a lot of “actually just fine” giant silk moths would get the “Dead” annotation if the average observer were left to judge if the moth is “near death”.
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I would always use alive for any animal still showing life signs.. it will not be totally wrong at least, as surely the the animal has been pretty much alife not long ago, if it still moves. I think that is the important part to know.
For example I did find a dead bug today, probably cut out of a spiders web somewhere.. I feel it was important to note that it was dead, as it would have been a very late finding of a life specimen. However, for the same reason it would have been important information to know if it would still have shown some life signs and indeed be a late specimen.. even if it would have died in the next minutes.
I think I read somewhere that we are supposed to document the current situation and not extrapolate what we think will happen or happened in the past ..e.g. an organism that has travelled in a car and was found in an unlikely location, or an obvious escapie.. still we should just document what is now and maybe leave a note… I would do the same in this situation judging life or death.. it is probably still alife or at least has been currently, just note that it might have died soon.
I have once had someone label my clearly alife bumblebee as dead, as the persons opinion was it would anyways have died soon due to not finding food or whatever.. I found this super weird.. by this logic we are all a little bit dead already..
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