WAS: Butterflies - NOW: Newbie Catfish ID

[Jools]

Got them all them butterflies identified now. It's funny looking around other specialist animal sites - you get a few ideas on how people who aren't entirely immersed in a particular field see things. It also makes me thing Planet is a pretty decent site - but I could make the cat-elog easier for the novice.

Jools

[clothahump]

You could do a simple A-Z gallery of all species, a lot of people try to identify fish by sight, when they have found what they are looking for then let them click through to the description.

[Jools]

I thought about this before. There are somewhere around 1000 species on Planet and a potential 3000 I would guess. If I show a thumbnail of each species on one page (and the average thumbnail size is 12K) then that one page is >1 meg!

Given that a lot of people would go to this page first becuase they are looking for a catfish they know nothing about but is quite common it would play merry hell with my bandwidth usage as well as being pretty slow for 56K or less users. Not to mention, would you find what you were looking for in 1000 thumbnails?

Some sort of per species "commonness" weighting for each species might help. I kind of tried this with the top 100 species and this nearly works except that many high profile cats are also there.

If I put graded 10 = superrare and 1 = supercommon type rankings against each species then I would be able to produce 10 pages in order of increasing rareity. 9 out of 10 newbies would find their fish on the first page.

Downside is I have to go through 1000 odd species and rate them from an international viewpoint!

Jools

[clothahump]

OK, I see the problem.
How about going by body shape and size description, a series of choices that would lead to a page of fish that roughly fit the bill?
This could be done with line drawings if needed.
I hear HH is a dab hand with a pencil, so is Ian Fuller if I remember correctly.

[Rusty]

Some sort of simple keying system would be useful. They are commonly used by scientists to ID fish fresh in from the field. IIRC, Armbruster has a Lori key on his site as an example. Perhaps this could be done with drawings or very simple wording?

Rusty

[Jools]

Yeah, that might allow a species to be reasonably easily identified to family, but that's not much use if its a plec, cory or syno. 9 out of 10 users are still going to have to sift through hunderds of thumbnails - you're not thinking like someone who doesn't know how to spell Corydoras (I don't mean that flippantly, there was a time when we all didn't know what we do now, it is just to get across my point that we are all very close to the trees on this topic).

We need to think outside of the classification box. Along the lines of hey, I've just walked into a fish store and bought my first catfish (or at least that's what the LFS guy said it was) and I want to learn more about it. Reality means quick access will be required after the point of sale, but there is no harm whatsoever in allowing those who look before they leap access to data on a commonly encountered basis too.

Jools

[Coryman]

There are a few basic questions we ask a newbe when they want to know what there catfish is.

1) does it have long barbels (whiskers) Yes - No
2) Does it have short barbels Yes - No
3) Does it have spots
4) Does it have stripes
5) Does it a sucker mouth
6) Does it have a forked tail
7) Does it have a long snout

Simple questions with a 'yes' link to a page of thumbs of 20 of the most common species with that feature. 10 titles 20 thumbs = 200 species.

keeping it simple work for novices.

Ian

[Jools]

Great ideas. I think the above has now been addressed by the sticky in the "what is my catfish" forum and by the top 100 species pages.

Jools