Is it "captive" or is it "wild"?

The line on where to mark things captive versus wild has been debated often on the forums, and still seems to cause a lot of confusion. I hope this will clarify matters somewhat.

At the basic level:

Captive = an organism that exists in a place and way that a human intended. Examples would be a potted plant, a household pet, or livestock in a pasture.

Wild = something that lives in a place where humans did not (intentionally) put it. A wild bird, a tree in the forest, a mushroom - these are all obviously wild.

Here's where it gets more complicated, and where a lot of people get confused:
Things growing ON captive things - plant pathogens often get marked as captive because they're growing on a captive plant. But unless you deliberately inoculated your houseplant with powdery mildew fungus to see what it would do, the mildew would be wild. Same goes with unintended organisms in your house or sprouting in your garden bed. These are often particularly important to NOT mark as captive, because they can indicate new outbreaks of diseases or invasive species, and they become hidden from view when marked captive.

Brief captivity - if you capture a bug in a jar so you can take a photo, or pick up a lizard, it is still "wild" - you are still in the spot that you found the creature, and it was at that location on its own. The fact that you have briefly interrupted it doesn't require it to be marked captive.

Samples brought home: Some organisms, such as certain fungi, just can't be identified in the field, or you need access to equipment you don't have with you. If you take a sample home, examine it, photograph it, and upload those photos, (and the specimen hasn't gone through any significant changes since you found it) it should still be considered wild, but you should upload it with the date and location you found it in originally, NOT where you took it to examine.

However, if it has changed substantially - say you found a cocoon in the woods, but when you brought it home and put it in your nice warm house for 2 days, it hatched into a moth - the moth should be considered technically captive, because it was your influence (putting it somewhere warm) that caused it to hatch at a time when it probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Some people take a picture of the cocoon in its original setting, and then add the additional images of the moth to that same observation, with a note about the adults being reared in captivity. Some people prefer to make a second, captive, observation of the adult moth and put a link to that in the cocoon observation. Either approach is fine.

A tree that was planted in landscaping is Captive, but if that tree sheds seeds and those sprout, the new seedlings are "wild". This goes for restoration plantings as well.

Gray areas:
A feral cat is considered "wild" and should be marked as such, while a pet cat is "captive" - even if they're sitting side by side hanging out in the same field. This seems weird, but it's important to know if feral cats can survive independently in an area. Some places might be fine for domestic cats, but cats living on their own outdoors don't survive.

Similarly, a pet dog that got abandoned on a roadside, stayed in that same spot, and eventually died, would be still considered captive - it was exactly where a human had intended it to be. But if that same dog took off running and wound up surviving in the woods a few miles away, it would be "wild".

Escaped pets should generally be considered wild, especially because there's no way of proving that they were pets, or how they got there. An unusual animal wandering around loose in an area should be taken as just that - making assumptions about how it got there doesn't do anybody any favors.

It could be an abandoned pet, or it could be the start of a new population of a non-native species. Or it could be a species known to harbor some disease that might spread to whatever predator snaps it up. But in any case, it's interacting with the rest of the natural environment, and ignoring it would be a mistake.

I do make an exception for "temporary escapees" - stray cattle that wander out of a broken fence, the neighbor's tortoise that gets apprehended halfway down the street, well-cared-for and collared dogs that happen to be currently unsupervised, etc. If it's obvious they were recently captive and will become so again very quickly, I think it's fine to ignore them. But this generally requires some personal knowledge of the area and animals in question, so I'll go with whatever the observer's wish is on those.

Another gray area is garden plants that volunteer from seed year after year, but only in cared-for conditions of a garden bed, and they do not survive outside of that location. There are valid arguments for both sides on that one, and I haven't decided which one I'm in favor of.

Posted on August 16, 2022 12:52 AM by graysquirrel graysquirrel

Comments

I observe aquatic micro-life. I collect some water (pond or marine) and then look at the contents at home under a microscope. I document these as wild. The same thing holds tor small insects that I put under a microscope to see the details. I am not culturing the specimens, just moving them to a location where I can get a better view. Should be no different than when I position a wild plant with my fingers tor a better view.

Posted by kenk over 1 year ago

@kenk Absolutely! I'm definitely not going to lug my microscope out to the edge of a mucky pond to do my observing there, haha. The only pitfall is remembering to change the observation location to where I got the sample, instead of the automatic coordinates generated when I took the photo, which would show it as being in my living room....

Posted by graysquirrel over 1 year ago

thank you!

Posted by lbolt over 1 year ago

For your last thing (garden volunteers) the are clearly wild, since they were not intentionally planted by a human.

Posted by raymie over 1 year ago

This is a good summary, but there is another gray area worth mentioning - escaped non-native, non-domesticated pets.
There are a significant number of sightings of escaped captives in the database and it can be difficult to determine when an escaped captive becomes "wild". There is considerable disagreement among users how to annotate these.
I think the best, most defensible policy here is that an animal that is currently being held captive is captive. Once that animal leaves captivity (escapes) it is wild.

Of course, that leaves you with the question how long does it have to be wild? How far does it have to be from its original captive site? Tough calls.
I always think of it as "wild vs captive" is the animal's STATE, not its ORIGIN.
It would be easier if the powers that be had chosen the phrase "In captivity" or "In cultivation" rather than just captive/wild.

Posted by sandboa over 1 year ago

@sandboa I agree! Escaped pets should generally be considered wild, especially because there's no way of proving that they were pets, or how they got there. An unusual animal wandering around loose in an area should be taken as just that - making assumptions about how it got there doesn't do anybody any favors.

It could be an abandoned pet, or it could be the start of a new population of a non-native species. Or it could be a species known to harbor some disease that might spread to whatever predator snaps it up. But in any case, it's interacting with the rest of the natural environment, and ignoring it would be a mistake.

I do make an exception for "temporary escapees" - stray cattle that wander out of a broken fence, the neighbor's tortoise that gets apprehended halfway down the street, well-cared-for and collared dogs that happen to be currently unsupervised, etc. If it's obvious they were recently captive and will become so again very quickly, I think it's fine to ignore them. But this generally requires some personal knowledge of the area and animals in question, so I'll go with whatever the observer's wish is on those.

Posted by graysquirrel over 1 year ago

@sandboa Site staff have actually clarified that this is what is intended:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/escaped-pets-with-no-established-population/6611/10

Posted by raymie over 1 year ago

@raymie - yeah, I'm aware of iNat's position. But getting iNat user's to accept that position is the trick, as you well know. It is always going to be a gray area and every user is going to be somewhere in that area but not the same position.

Posted by sandboa over 1 year ago

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