Tag: taxonomy

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Ancient Web: Invertebrates of the Salish Sea Built a Field Guide With 450 Species

Some websites become large because somebody keeps publishing. Others become large because nature refuses to stop making weird animals.

Visit Invertebrates of the Salish Sea

Hosted through Walla Walla University’s Rosario Beach Marine Laboratory, the site is a field and teaching guide to marine invertebrates from the Salish Sea, especially Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The key currently covers more than 450 species across 17 phyla, 80 orders, and 225 families.

That is not a casual photo gallery.

A field guide built from actual field animals

Individual species pages combine descriptions, photographs, natural-history notes, and observations made by the site’s author and contributors.

The homepage notes that most photographs were taken from live animals either in the field or temporarily in the laboratory before being returned.

Navigation works several ways because identification rarely begins with a known species name.

Visitors can browse alphabetically or systematically, use a key beginning with a recognizable group, or start with a broader dichotomous key when they do not know what kind of animal they are looking at. An illustrated glossary explains anatomical terms needed to make those comparisons.

The site ranges through worms, sea spiders, barnacles, shrimp, crabs, bryozoans, anemones, jellyfish, comb jellies, sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, molluscs, tunicates, and other groups most beach visitors never learn to name.

It also preserves environmental measurements from Rosario Beach, including water temperatures, intertidal conditions, light levels, and air temperature.

The author is careful about limits, explicitly warning that taxonomy changes and that the site should not be treated as the final authority on current classification. That caveat makes the project more trustworthy, not less.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list repeatedly turns up specialist pages that function like small public institutions.

This one is effectively a marine-lab field guide that anyone can open from a beach.

Return to Invertebrates of the Salish Sea

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Ancient Web: The Orchid Encyclopedia Grew to More Than 26,000 Species

Some personal websites become large by accident. The Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia became enormous on purpose: one orchid at a time, until the front page was counting more than 26,000 species.

Visit the Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia

The site is compiled by Jay Pfahl with help from editors, taxonomic fact-checkers and contributors around the world. As of August 2026, its front page listed 26,297 species across 863 genera and was still being updated.

That number matters, but the structure behind it is more interesting.

Photos, names and the problem of names changing

Each orchid entry is intended to combine photographs with useful identification and growing information. Where available, the site also links type drawings, botanical drawings, original publications and references to similar species. Synonyms are deliberately included in the alphabetical indexes because orchid names change and plants can circulate under outdated labels.

The result is part photo encyclopedia, part taxonomic cross-reference system.

The site’s disclaimer is refreshingly realistic about the limits of the project. Photographs come from growers and collectors, and mislabeled plants exist. Pfahl notes that some identifications have been scrutinized by taxonomic experts while others may need correction. The project openly invites people to help fix mistakes.

That is a healthier model than pretending a giant volunteer-built database arrived from heaven fully correct.

Independent publishing at absurd scale

The pages themselves still feel like the old Web: long indexes, text links, small icons, direct explanations and plenty of personality from the person maintaining them. Yet the underlying job is serious. The site cites resources such as Kew botanical data and the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Tropicos database while maintaining a huge collection of contributed imagery.

For a webmaster, IOSPE is a reminder that a useful site does not require a trendy interface if the information architecture works and the maintainer keeps showing up. Depth compounds. Twenty species becomes two hundred, then two thousand, then enough pages to make a modern content team nervous.

This is exactly the sort of specialist project hiding inside CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list. The larger list exists for people who want to keep wandering.

The orchid encyclopedia is still growing. That may be the most old-Web thing about it.

Explore the Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia