Should we categories them as ‘Captive/Cultivated’? Or as ‘Wild’?
Let us take an example of traces of a ‘California Red Scale’ on a fruit. To imagine these traces, think of scars on the skin of citrus fruits.
In one sense, the California Red Scale was definitely not placed on the fruit intentionally by humans, in fact it was not placed on the fruit by humans at all. So it was wild. However, the location of the observation then, currently (supermarket) is entirely different from the location in which the California Red Scale would have appeared (which would be where the fruit was grown).
Which ties into the problem of choosing a location. Should we choose the location as the supermarket, or as the location of the fruit where it was grown (according to the labels of the supermarket)?
Similarly, I sometimes have the question about fish that was caught alongside a river. If you see it in the bucket of the fisherwoman/man, and you ask the fisherwoman/man where they caught it exactly and when, can we then classify its Wild status as ‘Wild’?
I agree with @jokkomarat. The locality is the supermarket; the organism managed to get there despite efforts to exclude it – it’s a wild organism. (I am a scale insect person and I do kind of wish there was an indoor / outdoor box to tick, to aid ID. I understand most wild organisms occur outdoors but it’s very helpful if you record one indoors to indicate that somewhere. It’s not always easy to tell on plant closeups.)
Please don’t do this (just making a comment without any contribution to a thread solely to keep it active/open). The settings for the forum (automatically closing most threads two months after last activity) were chosen intentionally to close threads that are not seeing organic activity and keep the forum more manageable. Thanks.
The way iNat is parameterized currently is not set up to study things like market produce in a serious way. Which I guess is ok– it can’t do everything. Ah well…
Hi @tristanmcknight, it seems like my bumping (sorry, I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed) led to some activity. :)
What were the conclusions of the previous forum posts you’d say, if any, and/or what do you mean when you say that iNautralist isn’t fit for studying market produce please, or that the posts didn’t lead somewher? Do you mean that people are categorising the observations (concerning wild/captive etc…) in a ‘wrong’ way? Finally, have we gotten any clear explanatory page / policy on the iNaturalist website surrounding this topic?