Don’t worry, the only orchids I have access to are houseplants.
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No, they are not poached. There are lots of crazy cultivars.
I almost always obscure my observation locations - but that’s not for the organisms’ privacy, it’s for mine. Once you have multiple places and times publicly linked to one individual, that becomes a way that someone’s routine, daily commute, workplace, or even home address can be narrowed down.
The odds that someone going through iNat observations might try to do this is exceedingly low, but there’s always the possibility that my account here might be tied to another social media account I have. And unfortunately, social media is a great place to run into people who are very dedicated to harassment.
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Now that tissue culture exists, I don’t think many of those orchids are poached, especially if they are cultivars - which are usually not wild.
Last year people iNatted disas on Table Mountain.
The next week, there was a neatly dug hole, where the disas were.
Cultivars started with - what - wild species orchids - which were poached?
Same difference with birds or reptiles, bred in captivity. But that first pair??
@slugcycles there is an open request to obscure the time of observation for people who iNat live. (I use a camera and upload later - do NOT want to announce - hello world - I am not at home, but I am just here right now).
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Those are common sentiments shared by a lot of people but it can get complicated. Unless you’re collecting on your own property, you need permission from the land owner. Some areas, such as State/National Parks are off-limits for collecting plant material including seeds. I’ve asked about seed collecting along highways where wildflowers were sown/planted and that was a hard no as well. It’s easy to “get away with” shaking out a few seeds here and there but that doesn’t make it legal to do so without a permit.
It gets another layer of complication when doing it in e.g. a botanical garden or public park where horticultural varieties may have been planted that have restrictions on propagation. Some named cultivars being sold have labels that say “propagation prohibited” or something to that effect. Plant breeders put money and effort into selecting and developing their cultivars, and they want people to buy rather than steal them. Also, a lot of seeds in this context don’t breed true (e.g. horticultural hybrids). Again, easy to get away with if you’re just grabbing a few seeds for your yard, but if you were to try to sell those plants you might run into legal issues.
From an observer perspective, the occasions when I had people ask for seeds were almost all about rare plants or unique sports, e.g. white-blooming cardinal flower, or red-blooming butterfly weed etc. In almost all of these cases, there was just a few or even just one plant, so the common advice to only collect from 10% of a population can’t be applied. Plant collectors aren’t out there to pick up the common stuff, but they want the rare and unusual, and at least one person straight up admitted they were trying to get it to propagate for sale in their nursery. I realize this is how “selections” in the horticultural trade often get started but I don’t want to be complicit and have become very careful about posting such observations. My take on it is if you want seeds, get out there to collect yourself, preferably with the proper permits and all, especially if you’re planning to turn them into business for your nursery.
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I’m just saying that many of those original orchids may have been poached back before iNat even existed. Maybe we should, when adding rare obs, make the accuracy radius huge - like state (in the US at least) level.
I obscure all the wild orchids I observe.
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Everything you have said can be true and a problem. For me, the question usually come up about people wanting to collect seeds of common native plants for restoration or for planting in their yard. The “10% or less” is standard advice in my area. Obviously, that means you don’t collect from tiny populations.
That’s a good rule of thumb.
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