Captive and Escaped Animals

[Reuven Martin]

I'm wondering what the general policy or consensus is on how escaped animals should be treated. In my local area, it seems that a couple of regularly encountered species are generally not tagged (Red-eared Slider and domestic ducks and geese), but other rarer escapes are tagged as captive. This seems rather circular to me, and is what has always annoyed me with how eBird treats exotic species. In any case you're losing potentially valuable data by lumping it in with pets and zoo animals.

My feeling is that generally any animal that is "wild" (even if it's in a city, etc.), not being deliberately kept alive by people and not likely to be recaptured should be left as "wild" in iNaturalist, even if it was certainly born in captivity or transported from its point of origin. These animals are part of the ecosystem and in some cases could be the founders of a new population.

This page: https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/6803-captive-organism-observations leaves it as kind of a gray area. The closest example is a feral cat, but in many cases those are reproducing in the wild.

[Charlie Hohn]

My understanding is if there is reproduction happening they are naturalized, if not they should be marked as captive even if they are loose. But for sure there are some grey areas, like a parrot that lives 50 years and has been feral for 20?  And of course if you see a gecko in the city you don't know if it's reproduced or not

[bouteloua]

This is the iNat help page where that journal post copied the language from:

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive

The data are still there, you just have to turn on Casual grade or uncheck "Verifiable." Yes, lumped with zoo animals/pets, but depending on the species it might not be that difficult to sort through them. Some specific examples might be helpful for discussion. 

It's not always possible to tell what the situation is from a single photo, as you say, whether the creature is really loose, deliberately being kept alive, and/or whether it's likely to be recaptured.

I do agree that it's not a perfect system e.g. I personally wouldn't mark a gecko being transported on a house plant from Florida to Canada as "not wild." I would preferably be able to mark it as something closer to "waif." But still, seeing that distant little blue circle persist on the map of observations irks me a little. :)

cassi

[Reuven Martin]

For an example, check out Mandarin Ducks in North America. There are 20 research grade obs, but another 71 obs with photos marked as "captive/cultivated". Most of those don't appear to be zoo animals. That's not an insignificant number. I get the impression that there are small wild populations or at least good numbers of escapes in Southern California. But it's hard to say when so many obs are lumped in with zoo animals, or just not submitted at all because people know it will just end up as "casual".

This can be a genuine problem. One of the difficulties in figuring out whether certain bird species (e.g. Common Shelduck) occur as natural vagrants to North America is that we have no idea how many escapes go unreported because people don't care unless the location and circumstances make a wild origin somewhat plausible. If such observations could reach "research grade", people might be more likely to submit them and it might actually be possible to figure out what's going on.

On Thursday, December 7, 2017 at 7:28:18 PM UTC-5, Reuven Martin wrote:

[Whitney Mattila]

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I do a lot of copy and paste comments for people to mark possibly domestic animals as culivated. Maybe if there was a domestic flag?

[Reuven Martin]

On a related note, what is going on with this observation, that is not obviously captive, that is apparently flagged as captive by "iNaturalist.org"?

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8287070

On Thursday, December 7, 2017 at 7:28:18 PM UTC-5, Reuven Martin wrote:

[Charlie Hohn]

it is tagged captive barbecue for certain species where pretty much all observations come up as captive, it will automatically do that for the species. 

What makes you think it isn't captive though? It's a non-native species that is probably brought in to ponds or whatever, behind a fence. I'd guess captive.  If you have evidence that it isn't you can vote 'yes' on 'wild' and it will override the computer. But better not to do it if you aren't sure.

Also might want to un obscure this species for so-cal if it really is naturalizing.... not a threatened species there

[bouteloua]

Under Data Quality Assessment click the blue "i"

"The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized."

I don't think there is a way to search for these observations in order to check if the system is tagging things correctly.

c

[AfriBats]

Thanks for pointing this out, Cassi, I had never noticed that! In fact, I don't see why the system should do that, and why a majority system should make sense in the context of flagging observations as captive / not wild. The more there are captives around in a given place, the more likely it should become for a critical mass of escaped / released / dispersed individuals or propagules to form an established and reproducing population. 

Do we really profit from having them automatically flagged? I think it should be left to the community, where it often requires checking with the observer what the specific circumstances were.

Jakob

[tony rebelo]

A case in point is the Mallard and its domestic White Quacker.   It is in those areas that have the most domesticated ducks that have the greatest number of wild alerts and the highest incidence of hybridization with our indigenous Yellowbill duck (or the undulating anus - but that is another storey).   

It is OK if the system automatically votes, but it must alert the observer that this has been done, to cater for these exceptional circumstances.

[Charlie Hohn]

The reason the site does that is to deal with the mass amount of observations of dogs, tulips, rose bushes, etc. Basically, those students and newbies again :)  One could argue it should be restricted more or something, i haven't noticed problems with it yet.