Dear iNaturalists,
See title. How should we treat such observations?
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’?
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You cant trust the labels from the supermarket.
The organism is not intentionally there, so it is wild.
The data could be interesting to track neobiota.
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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.)
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Bumping this to prevent auto-closure.
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.
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OP, for what it’s worth, I’ve tried arguing the exact same point a few times in past years and gotten nowhere. Here are a few of my attempts at it:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/marking-exotic-animals-as-captive-when-theyre-clearly-not/69264/11?u=tristanmcknight
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-any-possible-utility-for-observations-of-cultivated-crops-or-harvested-products-photographed-in-a-market-at-home/39195/16?u=tristanmcknight
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…
I would think of this as ‘wild’, but also annotate as ‘not established’ unless there’s a breeding population of them.
It isn’t possible to annotate insects as “not established”; this option only exists for a few taxa (reptiles/amphibians)
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Create an observation field if there isn’t one already that fits?
There already is the escapee/non-established observation field, which is fairly widely used, but this is different from the established annotation
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