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Many impatient visitors to The Encyclopedia of Life are no doubt clamoring for a look inside. So you can at least have a glimpse, here are two videos we just posted to YouTube:
Homepage:
Species Pages:
The Encyclopedia of Life was officially launched and we are tracking progress and responses. Please be sure to complete the survey accessible on the homepage and to also participate in our forum. We haven’t said much yet about what’s going on behind the scenes, so here’s a quick glimpse into the gadgetry whirring away and the people keeping it all working well at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA:
 The EOL Biodiversity Informatics Launch Team |
 Pam Fournier, keeps the rack-mounted servers (one of three cabinets shown) working well |
We’ll have plenty more to write about the infrastructure and informatics behind EOL. That is, when we stop to take a breath.
In last week’s issue of Science News there was a wonderful article about us by Susan Milius:
“Biological Moon Shot–Realizing the dream of a Web page for every living thing”
(Week of Feb. 2, 2008; Vol. 173, No. 5 , p. 72)
The article covers much of what is currently going on in the EOL in these last few pre-launch weeks, it does an especially good job of conveying how accessible and useful the EOL will be in the future while at the same time explaining some of the reasons why it will take some time for it to realize it’s full potential.
I highly encourage anyone interested to read the whole article for themselves, but here is a nice tidbit from it that I added some links to:
“Sample encyclopedia Web pages show flashy images and videos plus links to the latest genetic sequences and a scan of the page of the book in which the first published description of a species appeared. Cool, yes, but time-consuming. Developing entries of that quality for millions of species will take years, and Edwards doesn’t want the world to lose interest in the meantime.
So, the encyclopedia will release something fast, but just a small something: a portal to basic info on fish. The creators will present the pages as a work in progress, soliciting user comments.
Visitors will be able to admire a portrait of the zebra turkeyfish and a map of its range in the Pacific, for example, or learn that the white-spotted boxfish typically frequents tropical waters 1 meter to 30 m deep. The modern Latin names will be paired with tables of common names in dozens of languages.
The fish information itself won’t be an encyclopedia creation. Instead, the informatics specialists are building a new portal to an existing site, called FishBase. This strategy illustrates how such a grand undertaking as the compendium of all living things might just be possible. The project won’t start from scratch with 10,000 taxonomists typing until they create an encyclopedia. Specialists have already made databases with reliable information, and the encyclopedia will provide a central entryway for using these trusted sources.
“Everybody wants his or her favorite organism there first,” says Edwards. “If you’re a leech lover, you want leeches. If you’re a spider lover, you want spiders.” What the encyclopedia crew is actually going to present next, with or just after the fish, are plants in the Solanaceae family—including tomatoes, peppers, petunias, tobaccos, and potatoes. “It’s timely, because 2008 is the International Year of the Potato,” says Edwards. (Not a joke. See “It’s Spud Time”.)
As the Encyclopedia of Life grows, its tools will capture the latest research to enrich those sources. Google-like aggregation technology will register new publications or gene sequences, for example, that appear on the Web.
“The most exciting thing about this project to me is that we have a blizzard of information coming at us all the time—and it’s not just in science, it’s everywhere,” says Mark Westneat of the encyclopedia group based at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Financiers monitoring markets and even travelers wondering whether to pack boots have some fine systems for sifting out the desired snowflakes from all the rest of the information. “Biologists are a little bit behind in informatics tools,” he says.
The fish segment illustrates another feature of the encyclopedia plan: the quality of sources. Westneat, who studies reef fishes, encountered FishBase in its larval stage at a biologists’ gathering in the Philippines in 1995. One of its originators, fish biologist Rainer Froese, brought an early version of this database and appealed to his colleagues to groom glitches out of it and supply photographs. “We grudgingly did so,” says Westneat. “We thought, ‘Oh, this will be nice for school kids and stuff, but I’ll never use it.’” Then heroic efforts by William Eschmeyer of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco standardized the taxonomy with up-to-date forms and lists of synonymous names. “All of a sudden, FishBase became this incredibly valuable resource,” Westneat says. “I use it every day.”
Such trustworthy information isn’t just swimming free in the seas. “A significant challenge facing the Encyclopedia of Life is engaging the scientific community to provide content,” says botanist Richard Ree of the Field Museum. “Similar initiatives have been tried in the past, and I think it’s safe to say that none met with resounding success.”
Ree does add that the project has advantages over previous proposals. The star power of E.O. Wilson and the TED conference attendees could catalyze interest from the corporate sector and allow access to its considerable experience in developing tools for managing computer information.
The encyclopedia planners are well aware of the need for active support from scientists, says Westneat. He leads a team focusing on how to make the encyclopedia so useful that scientists will decide that providing top-quality information is worth their time. “The scientific community is going to make the Encyclopedia of Life rich, and it’s going to make it correct,” he says. In turn, that gold standard information should enrich the specialists’ pursuits.”
I am thrilled to see the progress being made by the EOL team and look forward to the first release of the website. Technology has opened up entirely new opportunities for the advancement and popularization of natural science and environmental issues. As the pressure of human civilization on the sustainability of the planet continues to build, we simply cannot do enough to inform and energize the world to recognize the incredible web of life we live within and imperatively require for our continued existence. EOL offers a new vehicle to enable professional and citizen scientists alike to reach out to each other and the world at large. From the appearance of its first shoots at the TED meeting in February the EOL will continue to grow and flourish as care and attention are showered upon it until it ultimately flowers and produces a truly sweet and nourishing fruit. The Missouri Botanical Garden is proud to be a cornerstone partner of this important and ambitious endeavor and looks forward to working with the global plant community to contribute to and support the Encyclopedia of Life in the coming years.
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 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.
“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.