Biological Moon Shot
Realizing the dream of a Web page for every living thing
By Susan Milius
Richard Pyle hasn’t gotten a congratulatory crate of free diapers. But he’s one of the fathers, in a sense, of the first fish species named in 2008. Quintuplet species even. The journal Zootaxa posted descriptions of five damselfish on Jan. 1 that Pyle and his colleagues at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu found using a specialized mix of gases to push beyond the depth limits of conventional SCUBA gear.
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In a few weeks, the rest of us will be able to catch up on such frontiers of exploration a lot more easily. A sweeping informatics project called the Encyclopedia of Life is scheduled to launch its first trial entries on the Web in late February (SN: 5/12/07, p. 294). According to the plan, the encyclopedia portal will provide access to roughly 30,000 Web pages of specialists’ data—one page for each of the known species of fish.