Notes from a biologist

[wellcaffeinated]

Hi MinuteLabs!

I would like to congratulate you heartily on having designed an extremely cool and useful tool to visualise phylogenetic relationships between species, and I have just used the Tree of Life Explorer as part of a student field excursion, where we went out an collected invertebrates in the field, and in real time assembled a tree to show their interrelationships on an iPad with a cellular connection. It was very instructive and a lot of fun!

I find it a super useful tool and will surely use it again in similar teaching contexts. However, there were a few things that came up while using the tool, which you may still want to improve. Please take this as it is intended, namely as constructive criticism of an already amazing tool.

• I came across some clades that could not be added. For example, when I try to add "Trichoptera", I get the following error:
  Error: Request failed with status code 400

• Another issue that I am sure you are aware of already is that the capitalisation of clade and genus names does not work consistently. The only names that are written in lowercase are species (and subspecies), all other clade names (i.e. from genus up) are always capitalised. As I biologist, I find it almost physically painful to see done incorrectly ;-)

• Some images are incorrect. For example, the flatworms I work with (genus Macrostomum), include an image of a fish (and amazingly, most of the other images stem from work that my lab was involved in, sweet!). I guess this is hard to avoid, and it might just be a fish species with the species name macrostomum. Maybe doing this case sensitive might solve some of these problems?

• Another issue I came across a few times is that I would select a genus name from the generated list, and would end up with plant rather than the animal I was expecting. This can happen because the plant and animal nomenclature codes are independent, and so while a name has to be unique within all plants or all animals, the same name can exist in both of these different kingdoms. But when one selects a name, it is not clear whether one gets one or the other. Maybe you could indicate that in the list. Moreover, it also means that I cannot select the animal clade, when only the plant clade is listed (though some of the specific species within the animal genus might still appear).

• And finally, the trees in the normal view use a lot of space, but I am not sure how that could be improved. Having the nice compact view helps, but if contains a lot of info. Could the cards maybe be rotated? Or maybe some kind of zoom function could be implemented?

But again, overall you have created a tremendously useful tool to teach animal diversity and evolution, and I have already told a ton of people about it.

Cheers,

Lukas