Surely everyone is aware of the really big news of the week. The catalog of species has topped one million. A worldwide effort to catalog all known species has been underway for about six years. Hopefully, by 2011, 1.75 million species of living things will be cataloged
There are a couple of places you can go to play around with this data. First, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System allows you to search for taxonomic information about living organisms. It was somewhat of a disappointment to me that there were "no records found" when I entered the genus "Heligmosomoides".
Species 2000 is the other place to go for all things taxonomic. I need to spend more time at these databases because I'm somewhat confused. You can find schistosoma but not onchocerca. You can find ascaris but not trichuris. A search for plasmodium results in no records found. Odd.
Browsing the taxonomic tree can pass some time however. But it too is oddly lacking. Search down through the phylum Apicomplexa down to the genus level and Cryptosporidium is all you find.
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