Encyclopedia of Life Blog

The Honey Badger, also known as the Ratel (Mellivora capensis)

Habitat: Most of Africa and western and south Asian areas of Baluchistan (eastern Iran), southern Iraq, Pakistan and Rajasthan (western India).

Favorite Foods: Honey/ bee larvae, superpoisonous snakes (can consume a medium sized–under 5 ft–snake in under 15 minutes, think about how many hot dogs that is), anything, literally anything, it can catch with its big sharp claws.

Two videos you MUST watch, even if you don’t read the rest of this:

Honey Badger Habits

Honey Badger and Greater Honeyguide

The scoop:
Though they look cute, and they have the word “honey” their name, Ratels can be likened to ruthless and cunning pirates. They fly solo, show no mercy, do nothing in moderation and fear nothing. These critters have been rated the Guinness Book of World Record’s most fearless animal. They are remarkably intelligent, being one of the few animals capable of using tools: In a documentary film “Land of the Tiger”, a honey badger in India was caught on film making use of a tool–the animal rolled a log and stood on it to reach a kingfisher fledgling stuck up in the roots coming from the ceiling in an underground cave.

My favorite thing about them, illustrated wonderfully in one of the videos, is their predisposition to eat highly venomous snakes, coupled with the fact that they are not immune to the poison of said snakes. Like fraternity brothers drinking during rush week, Ratels will chow down on a snake, pass out for a while from the poisonous bite, then when they come to, keep right on eating with gusto.
They also have a remarkable relationship with a small bird, the honeyguide in which the bird leads the badger to a beehive, and then feasts on the demolished remains once the badger is done.

They are tough as nails and meaner than Blackbeard (a notoriously cruel 18th century pirate). In one case, shown on an episode of Animal Planet, an old female honey badger that was nearly toothless and had one blind eye was attacked by a leopard. It took the leopard about one hour to kill the honey badger. Several African tribes report that the honey badger attacks the scrotum of larger mammals if provoked, and has even castrated humans.

On a contemporary cultural note, in mid 2007 urban myths began circulating in Basra city, Iraq, saying that UK troops stationed in the city’s airport had released a number of dangerous man-eating creatures into the area in order to spread panic among the local population. The stories described the creature as being black and about 1 m in length, with a monkey-like face and capable of moving fast. It was accused of attacking local farmers and their families and was blamed for cattle deaths. British forces quickly denied that they had released the creature. I think we can figure out who the real culprit was.

The Biodiversity Synthesis Center has been very active in the past three months: we have hosted three synthesis meetings, had a booth at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference in San Antonio, TX, and begun construction on our new conference center. We have also added two new employees to our team (as mentioned in a previous post) and are interviewing more post-docs.

Synthesis Meetings
Two of our meetings were the product of an exciting collaboration with a team at Adobe Systems in San Fransisco. The first was a small meeting between Adobe staff and BioSynC staff at the Field Museum to plan a more detailed meeting. The second one: “Visualizing the Tree of Life II: Developing a Graphic Interface for the EOL” (December 3) was held at Adobe Corporation headquarters. Hosted by BioSynC Director Mark Westneat, Assistant Director Rick Ree and Gever Tulley (Adobe), the meeting focused on developing a visualization interface for the “Tree of Life” which may serve as a gateway to the EOL. Mark and Rick were joined by several of the premier thinkers in phylogeny visualization: David Maddison (Arizona), Mike Sanderson (Arizona), Bill Piel (Yale), and David Patterson (EOL at MBL). Adobe is lending some great minds to the effort, including Gever Tulley, Marcos Weskamp, Simon Smith, and Mike Sundermeyer.
Our third meeting “Planning BryoZone: A Unified Bryozoan Reference on the Web” (December 12-15) was the first of many organism-focused synthesis meetings, organized by Scott Lidgard. Taxonomic synthesis meetings bring together some of the world’s experts on a particular taxonomic group to set the agenda for future research in the field and organize the group for incorporation into the EOL. This meeting focused on the Bryozoa, a cosmopolitan group of aquatic invertebrates that are found in all water depths and salinities, including freshwater. Bryozoans are an important group of microscopic animals that band together to create large skeletonized colonies, similar to tiny coral animals forming coral heads. The synthesis meeting brought together 10 experts from all over the world including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Poland, Colombia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to plan future research for the group. The meeting goals included producing a large PBI grant proposal for the National Science Foundation, designing and testing internet data that will become part of the EOL, and organizing the large but disparate existing data on these animals.
All three meetings were very successful, Adobe continues to pursue the creation of a tree visualization, and will debut a tree browser at the upcoming TED conference (end February 2008), while the Bryozoan scientists submitted their proposal and also are preparing data on Bryozoans to enter into the EOL.

Presentations and Outreach
As well as hosting meetings, BioSynC has been busy spreading the word about the EOL. Recent efforts include a presentation by Mark Westneat, Jim Edwards, and David Patterson on the EOL and BioSynC at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (Duke University), a variety of presentations to the public and to group meetings such as the Bivalve and Liverwort ATOL groups. A BioSynC team (Mark Westneat, Audrey Aronowsky, and Alta Buden) traveled to San Antonio,TX for the annual SICB conference, where they hosted a booth representing the BioSynC and the EOL.

Building The Center
Construction of the new Synthesis Center on the ground floor officially began December 21, 2007. Plans for the 3500 sq ft space in Hall C include two 150 sq ft offices for administrative staff, three shared 150 sq ft offices for postdoctoral and academic staff, an office cubicle area for students and interns, a conference room (300 sq ft), a seminar room (600 sq ft), a reception and discussion area complete with coffee and refreshment bar as well as a Tech Center with EOL consoles. The conference and seminar rooms will be fully AV and internet equipped. Six weeks into construction things are looking good, and we look forward to hosting biodiversity groups in our new space as soon as possible.

I know Dolphins are a cheap shot and everybody already loves them, BUT, did you know they could do this!!

Dolphins+violins+bubbles 

BioSynC is populated by a happy team of individuals with a wide range of experience. All of us have a scientific background and contribute to organizing and running synthesis meetings. Our Director, Dr. Mark Westneat has been at the Field Museum for 15 years and is the Zoology Curator of Fishes. He brings to the table an immense pool of connections within the scientific community with some of his main interests being the biomechanics of fishes as well as marine ecology and the study of coral reef life in particular. He currently acts as the main public representative for our organization, giving talks and presentations about the EOL, and our part of it on a regular basis.

Dr. Richard Ree, our assistant director, has been at the Field Museum for 5 years and is a leading authority in the systematics, evolution and biogeography of flowering plants. He acts as a representative for us within the botanical community (no small group) as well as helping Mark with other connections within the museum and scientific community.

Dr. Audrey Aronowsky, our scientific program manager, specializes in the systematics and ecology of marine mollusks; both snails and clams. She is active in many scientific societies and has organized and chaired sessions in invertebrate zoology, paleontology, and marine ecology. She is in charge of organizing synthesis meetings, managing scientific interactions within the center, and managing the center’s relationship with the scientific and academic community. Her baked goods and LSU Tigers enthusiasm have become renowned throughout the museum.

Alta Buden, our biodiversity specialist, recently completed her Bachelors Degree at the University of Chicago. She double majored in History and Philosophy of Science as well as Visual Arts. Besides having a broad knowledge of biodiversity, she acts as our resident artist and web expert, helping out with PR by coordinating our website, blog, posters, brochures, and image library. She also brings a fresh perspective to our work, having had experience working in many different nonscientific fields, from the New York Gallery scene to the human rights situation on the Thai-Burma border. She also works hard to keep everyone up to date on the “hip” lingo spoken by America’s youth today.

Dr. Torsten Dikow, our first Postdoctoral research associate, is an expert in the taxonomy, phylogeny, and biodiversity of the Asiloidea (robber flies). He joined us after completing his Ph.D. in entomology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City followed by a short postdoc at the same museum. He is originally from Germany and has traveled the world to study and collect true flies in habitats ranging from hot deserts to temperate forests and subtropical grasslands to tropical rain-forests.

We have recently (yesterday!) been joined by a new Administrative Assistant, Darolyn Striley, who we have stolen from the Natural History Museum of LA County, where she worked as a curatorial assistant for five years at the Marine Biodiversity Processing Center. She has taken on our financial and Human resources coordination as well as contributing her knowledge of Decapod crustaceans to our team. Originally from Guatemala, Darolyn received her Bachelors from UCLA in Women’s Studies. She has traveled extensively and done field work in Fiji, Palau and Montana. We are very glad to have her here and hope she survives her first Chicago winter. (Please note that the predicted high temp. for saturday is 7 degrees Fahrenheit!!!)

The Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) is located in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Our charter goal is to generate new insight into life’s diversity, evolution, distribution and conservation. Integrating diverse information sources empowers people to generate new questions, insights and discoveries. We do this by supporting and hosting scientific meetings to explore topics in biodiversity, such as taxonomy, biogeography, phylogenetics, and bioinformatics. Meetings are proposed by the scientific community to assemble novel and complimentary groups of people addressing central questions in biodiversity. Our task is to help to recruit experts in biodiversity, computer science, and conservation to the Encyclopedia of Life, and in this way we act as a main liaison between the EOL and both the scientific and academic communities.

We are concerned not only with what goes into the EOL, but with what could potentially come out of it. The possible applications for newly pooled data made easily accessible by the EOL are numerous and multifaceted. From creating new ways to visualize the evolutionary tree on the internet, to furthering the study of underrepresented and popularly unknown species, our hope is to have impact on the scientific community contributing to the EOL, the daily lives of the greater global citizenry, and the fight to conserve biodiversity on our planet.

“For more than 250 years, scientists have cataloged life, and our traditional catalogues have become unwieldy,The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe. It will enable us to map and discover things so numerous or vast they overwhelm our normal vision.” -Ralph E. Gomory, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Scientists began creating individual web pages for species in the 1990s. However, Internet technology needed to mature to allow fast and efficient creation of a comprehensive Encyclopedia. While specific Encyclopedia of Life efforts, including the scanning of key research publications and data, have been underway since January 2006 (Eol Press release May 9, 2007), only in the past year has the global community been catalyzed into action.

The butterfly if you will, that beat its wings and created the storm of activity surrounding the creation of the Encyclopedia of Life in the past year, is no less than an entomologist, one of the greatest scientists of our time and founder of the field of sociobiology, Edward Osborne Wilson (please, feel free to imagine 78 year old Wilson with antennae and great big wings, also, here is an interview of him by Bill Moyers, and his biodiversity website).

In March of 2007 Wilson was invited to make a “wish” at the annual TED conference convened in Monterey, California. Namely he was given the opportunity to address one of the few gatherings of people on the planet, who, through a combination of social, political and financial endowments, might actually be able to make world changing wishes a reality. It was incredible gift, and Wilson used it wisely. His wish was: “that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life,” he went on, “What excites me is that since I first put forward this idea, science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before.” His speech is a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, for us to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we’re still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to their ecosystems; yet we’re still steadily destroying nature.

Almost immediately, the components necessary for the Encyclopedia of Life began to fall into place. An immense amount of inspired work has been done over the past year to facilitate its initiation and there are some ambitious goals for the new year. This blog will function to publicize that work, for both people involved in the EOL and other related organizations as well as for anyone who is interested in how some of the most dynamic people, technologies and institutions are coming together to achieve a higher goal that will have an impact not only on our daily lives, but the future of our planet.

The BHL (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/About.aspx) currently consists of English language collections from the USA and UK (although we have huge amounts of material in over 40 other languages). I am working with European colleagues to develop a programme of activity in Europe to cover the other European languages. German and Netherlands colleagues are already working on bids and trial scanning. We are preparing a bid to the EU eContentplus programme for money to manage these activities across Europe (unfortunately, the EU will not fund scanning directly) and this will be lead by the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
We are currently looking for partners to join the eContentplus bid – in particular, we are looking for institutions with substantial collections of biodiversity literature, experts in scanning and digitisation, and researchers interested in OCR (optical character recognition) technologies. If you are interested in joining us, please contact me on g.higley@nhm.ac.uk.