I am a rookie ant keeper and been catching some queens lately. I’ve been trying to use iNaturalist to id the ants I catch and have been putting then as Captive but on one of the obsevations I add someone said “you don’t need to mark it captive jut because you captured and kept it, just make sure the date and location where it was found”. So, do I have to keep saying their captive or am I allowed to ignore that setting.
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Only mark them captive after the first observation, or if you move them considerably from where you caught them, in my opinion. I found a toad and kept it over the winter (because where I found it was the woodpile I was removing, late in the fall) and I made an iNat observation of it at the location I found it at the time I found it.
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I do the same thing for ants (but not marking them as capitive) In fact, most of my posts of ants are of queens. Do you have any luck wintering them? All of mine always die.
I did that to a smooth snake once and it gave birth to 8 or 9 baby snakes!
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Yes, if you take a pic within a reasonable amount of time (a day or two?) after first capture, and make the observation for the original location and date/time, you do not need to mark as captive. If the ant is obviously “in captivity” in your pictures, you may want to note that the location/date are for the capture itself and give a preemptive thumbs up vote to Wild in the DQA as some IDers might mark it as captive just based on the photo.
Once anything seriously changes about the organism (grows, flowers, metamorphoses, etc) you shouldn’t upload pics as wild with original date since those pics wouldn’t represent the state of the organism at capture and could throw off things like phenology, etc. Any observations like that should be marked captive.
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Aw! Did they do well?
Sadly no😢 I was able to release a few of them but most of them didn’t live that long. It was a long time ago but from what I remember I had a hard time feeding them.
The positive thing was that my friends and I got to hold baby snakes. They were so cute!
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Whenever I catch insects for collections, if they’re wild, I don’t mark them as captive, but I will note in the observation details that the specimen was kept alive or sent to a researcher. Here’s some examples:
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