557 karma · joined November 25, 2008
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Edit: Regardless, I pulled it from production immediately out of an abundance of caution.
However, the unique "roll-up" visualization of traits brought in an interesting method of self-correction. For example, if any other phyla than the obvious 4 showed up with a single egg-laying species, I went back to the drawing board to find out where that incorrect join introduced the error.
Thanks to open data, I offer the same node hierarchy of OTT, among 10 other backbones, but present it with 3 different (perhaps less dazzling) viewing mechanics switchable at the top: Icicle, which packs hierarchy into a fixed vertical height while allowing depth to stay horizontally reachable. Chronogram is the opposite, showing structure even 10 levels deep in a compact horizontal region, but at the expense of large vertical expansion. And Tree, the default, which is a compromise that can also show multiple winding paths simultaneously by folding them against the gutter.
I also focus less on the tree itself and more on trait overlay and rolling up thousands or even millions of species into compact segments so you can get a feel for how many chordates lay eggs or how many spiders are carnivorous at a glance. https://ptree.org/#OTT
The project only exists thanks to thousands of scientists carefully cataloguing all this data and releasing it CC-BY. I am only the interface.
That raccoon you see is actually suffering from Morbillivirus Canine Distemper Virus and that photo is correctly attached to that virus, and that bird is indeed eating a lungfish. I actually do penalize outlier favorite counts for photos because they're often meme-ish. I may blacklist this so the 2nd most favorited lungfish can surface. There are a lot of detailed rules that score which photo you get based on aspect ratio, whether the subject is in captivity, alive, etc.
I do filter structural junk per backbone, but only from evidence that backbone itself supplies: synonym/accepted status, "not-a-taxon", environmental, hidden, unplaced flags. I also insert neutral buckets such as "classes (no phylum)" where ranks are skipped, so thousands of taxa don't spill into one flat level.
What I deliberately don't do is move a taxon to the parent that I think makes more biological sense. Ptree (Ptable gets the same kind of requests to classify metalloids) is downstream of academic taxonomic authorities operating under something like Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. It can expose disagreement among authorities, but it shouldn't quietly become another undocumented taxonomy.
Naldaviricetes is a good example. It is unquestionably a class of viruses, but "Viruses" is not necessarily its formal kingdom. ICTV currently leaves it unassigned to a realm, kingdom, or phylum so Ptree's ICTV backbone places it directly beneath a display root called Viruses. NCBI places it beneath "Viruses incertae sedis," while GBIF supplies it without that viral higher lineage, producing the confusing placement you found.
Then, a datacenter comes along, effectively a bigger, louder, richer neighbor playing by the same lack of rules and outdoes them at their own game. It's only oppression when a bigger dog shows up?
https://www.rtings.com/discussions/adsg5oN7w-9Dgb3O/treadmil...
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/1-8/graph/25566/noise-isol...:
Shows the highest occupied atomic orbital in full 3D you can rotate. Select any slot in the Hund diagram to see that orbital instead.