Uploading observations of organisms shipped to you

General
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I am aware that some observers have people in various parts of the world ship them orgainisms, and then they photograph the organism, and mark the location as the location from which the shipper said the organism was caught

A fake example: Suppose someone ships me a live ant from Britain, so I can photograph it with my insect photography equipment, and then I upload it with the location that the person in Britain told me they found it, is this legit? Should something be marked casual in the DQA? Is this prohibited entirely?

To be clear I do not do this, I simply want to know if this should be marked differently in DQA or if I as a curator should flag/warn/suspend people doing this

@tiwane

EDIT: I’m not sure this is clear to people in the comments, so I want to clarify that I am not uploading observations of organisms sent to me by others, nor am I considering doing so, I want to know how to respond to such observations when others make them, I am not asking if I can make such observations.

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If that info is in a note or a comment, then identifiers can each decide how to ID, and how to DQA.
I would Mark as Reviewed and leave it to the taxon specialists.

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I don’t think this is correct, DQA votes have an objective meaning, they are not an identifier’s personal decision

I am seeing this in areas where I am the taxon specialist, knowledge of the taxon does not help me know whether locations based on taking someone’s word for it are considered valid, or whether this kind of observation is allowed

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If iNat is about tracking one’s own wildlife-encounters (as I’ve heard on this forum a few times), then surely these observations should not be made? The uploader never encountered the organism in location x, where it was found.

And should the uploader make an observation at location y, where they took the pictures, I would imagine, the observation would need to be marked either “captive/not wild” and/or “location inaccurate” in DQA, as the specimen has been brought there deliberately by a human.

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The location of the observation must be used.

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Would it be best if the original observers uploaded the observations, as they are the ones who encountered the specimens in the wild? And they would credit you with taking the pictures for them.

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I don’t see any issue with this, so long as the date and location given are the date and location of wild collection, and you fully trust your source to be reliable and accurate about that information. I would nevertheless suggest best practice is to be upfront and give a brief summary in the description of the whole situation. Ideally, I would also mention how many days later the specimen was photographed after capture, as various types of life forms could degrade or otherwise change their appearance more or less rapidly once in captivity.

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My impression is iNat is about documenting the natural world, so an expert uploading excellent photography with the correct collection co-ords should be the perfect iNat observation, regardless of where they took the photos, or whether they personally collected the organism.

Main thing is accurate location.

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That’s not really the case. The DQA options have an objective meaning, but the reason they are votes on inat is because no individual person (other than the one actually posting the observation) can be certain of the facts involved. They are votes so that multiple identifiers/readers can make their own judgement about whether they believe the organism is wild, the location is accurate, etc.

In cases like you described, you are free to make your own judgement about whether you trust the information the observer has given, including whether you trust any third parties that they got their information from. Other users are free to make a judgement too, and hopefully a combination of informed judgements will come to a reasonable conclusion on the DQA votes.

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I think it would be one or the other, either treat it as wild caught with location of capture marked wrong, or treat it as captive. The question is if both date and location are that of capture, can these be legitimate RG obs?

I misunderstood, I thought you were saying that the definition of accurate or the definition of captive are up to the identifier, I agree with what you are saying now

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I occasionally get sent entomology specimens to identify and donate to my local museum. My own decision has been to NOT post these on iNat, because I want that to be about my own personal observations, but rather to use Bug Guide for things like that. However, I don’t see a problem with experts doing that; as has been stated by others, if the organism is correctly geolocated and dated, it seems reasonable to me.

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I did this once for someone that found a tiny ant-mimic spider. The spider was the size of a small ant and extremely difficult to photograph (since like the ants it mimicked it never stopped running around). They captured the spider, shipped it to me, I photographed it with a high-power macro lens, euthanized it, dissected and photographed its genitalia for species identification, extracted and sequenced its DNA to create a DNA barcode, and deposited it in a museum collection (where it was subsequently loaned out to someone working on a revision of the genus). I uploaded my photographs to an iNaturalist observation and put the date and location that the collector told me. I would have preferred that the collector created the observation, but they didn’t have any photographs to use. Since this was a species with very few observations on iNaturalist, it seemed helpful to add it despite the fact that I wasn’t the person who originally found it and I was relying on the collector for the metadata. It was also nice to have an iNaturalist observation that I could reference from the DNA records for people that wanted to see photographs of the specimen.

I think especially for microscopic organisms, it isn’t always reasonable to require that photographs be taken on site by the collector. That just isn’t practical in some situations. In my view, as long as the metadata accurately reflects the original observation/collection event and the photographs are not misleading about where the specimen was found, it’s probably OK.

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I posted a similar question here a while ago:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/my-observations/45602/35

The answer was a pretty resounding “those should be captive/casual”.

The point made was that an iNat observation documents an interaction between an observer and an organism, and at the time the observer (you) observed the organism, it was not wild. I had a similar situation when I uploaded my insect collection- I personally collected 99+% of my specimens in the wild, but I have a handful of insects that other people found and gave to me, and the conclusion was that I should either stop uploading those particular ones or else mark them as “captive”.

I personally agree that from a data standpoint, “who” physically collected the specimen from the wild is fairly unimportant- what matters is that the organism was found alive at location X at time Y, and whether I personally picked it up or my mother picked it up and gave it to me the next day doesn’t matter. But iNat is meant as a nature-engagement platform first, and a data source second, so even though no researcher cares whether I picked the bug up myself or not, iNat’s guidelines do care.

The best argument I can come up with for these to be “wild” is that iNat encourages posting trail cam photos, and the observer may have been 50 miles away from the trail cam at the time it went off and took a photo. So arguably the person catching the bug and giving it to you is like a trail cam- they’re a means by which you recorded the organism’s presence, despite you not being present at the time and place where the “observation” happened. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does illustrate that the “you have to be present at the time and place of the observation for it to be yours” argument does have exceptions.

The best argument against these being wild is that if you can post things other people found and just say when and where they found them, then iNat could just turn into people walking into a university collection room and posting 100,000 observations of dead specimens from the 1800s and copying down the data labels to get the location/date, which is not iNat’s mission.

I’d say in the end, posting a few observations like this isn’t going to get you in trouble (I’ve done it in the past, but very sparingly), but it’s not technically something that’s encouraged.

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In my opinion, yes. The way I look at it, the scientifically relevant data is what should make an observation Verifiable. In this case, date and location. If those match up to each other, and apply to the original collection of the organism, it should be eligible for RG.

On the other hand, of course, one could argue that since the person uploading the observation isn’t actually the one who collected it, both the date and location should be marked incorrect. This is more true to iNat’s official definition of an observation, in which the observer is a component. By that reasoning, the date and location should be where the photos were taken, and it should be marked captive. That’s not very useful for research, though.

If the date and location match, and you know that they accurately represent the place and time that it was found in the wild, I think it’s acceptable to bend the rules and let it go to RG. At that point the question is how sure you are of those things, which probably requires contacting the uploader to determine.

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But that could be solved by you sending them the photographs and

To me this combo seems like the solution most in keeping with how iNaturalist is supposed to work.

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I also occasionally post observations of arthropods (primarily spiders) that were collected by other people and sent to me for examination. I note the circumstances of the observation “this spider was collected in a house in a rural area by J. Doe and sent to me to examine,” use the date+locality the organism was originally observed, and obscure the location if the original collector did not want it posted publicly. I think these observations are valuable even if they don’t strictly meet some part of iNat’s guidelines. In many cases these are species with few-to-no records on iNat (because they need to be examined for confident ID) and in some cases they would not otherwise exist on iNat because the user is not a member and doesn’t care to create an account for whatever reason. Given this type of observation is usually made by people with some taxonomic expertise, I don’t think they are ever likely to ever make up any significant % of observations, and I think the value of the data outweighs any “technically this should not qualify because…” argument.

By some of the logic I’ve seen here, there could never be RG observations of, e.g., microscopic pond lifeforms, because I didn’t actually “observe” them in the pond, I just brought home some water samples to look at them under the microscope. So my observation would either be “captive” (since they are now under my microscope, transported intentionally by a human) or the location is wrong (since they were photographed in my house and not in the pond) or some other thing. To me, this is all rather silly even if you could rules-lawyer your way into arguing they shouldn’t count as RG observations. I doubt this has ever been the intent of iNat 's rules and I think these observations are great as long as the data is accurate.

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I read many responses here, but unless I missed something, there is no difference between photos au naturelle, photos from specimens shipped to us, and photos of museum specimens. I have done a number of the latter, doing my best to accurately record location of collection accurately from the data of the collection label and I include a photo of that in each observation, the last photo. This can be tricky, to be sure. In my group of expertise, the Donaciinae leaf beetles, a great many have not yet even been recorded once in iNat, so every record I can upload is important right now. I’ve ID’d existing Nearctic observations to the extent possible, and many of the right now 10,419 total for the world. I’ve seen how the CV has grown in its functionality for this group, for Nearctic taxa, since January when I started doing the IDs
INaturalist needs RG obs to function, period. MANY organisms, indeed the vast majority, are simply unlikely to be found by citizen scientists aka the general public. At last reading, it takes a minimum of 100 observations of which 50% are RG, for INaturalist CV to function. So we are a very long way from the final objective, considering maybe 25% of existing species of beetles are actually “known” to science…
Anyway, so bottom line, I fail to appreciate the issue surrounding “specimens shipped to us”, and consider these as valuable, or more so, than any taken live. I can take pix of important characteristics that simply can’t be recorded in the field for a number of reasons: beetle genitalia, plant seeds, fungal spores, moss leaf structure…we likely all get hung up on the specifics or our area of interest, but in the broadest sense, we’re here to help naturalist is broadly functional (though at the end of the day that is the tallest of orders).

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Right on…

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The key, as far as iNat is concerned, is that you brought home the water sample and took the photos under a scope. So you found the organisms in the wild, even if you didn’t know what they were at the time you collected them, because you hadn’t yet put them under the scope. The date/location you took the photographs is not when the “observation” happened, by iNat standards, but rather the date/location when you scooped the water.

If I send you some water to do the same microscope work with, iNat would not count your observations of those microbes as wild, because you didn’t take them from the wild yourself.

I agree completely, but if you’re asking what iNat’s position is, it’s going to come down to “we’re not GBIF, just because the data is valuable doesn’t mean this is the place for it”. Believe me, I’d love to start uploading dissected moth specimens that I didn’t personally collect of species not yet represented on iNat; I have access to loads of them. But I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that that’s not what iNat is for- I’m just relaying what’s been told to me by iNat staff in other posts.

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The main issue to me is that the location information is more likely to be accurate and precise if the original observer is putting it into iNaturalist. This is based on my experience when people pass me specimens to identify but can’t/don’t give me a precise location. It isn’t an insurmountable problem, just a tendency for people to want to know what they found but not be bothered about creating a record.

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