PlanetCatfish.com

I am not sure how difficult this would be to implement, but I think that we could benefit greatly from an interactive phylogenetic tree. Right now The Cat-eLog is organized by families. With a tree it would be easier to remember characteristics of the families by remembering the derived character states (apomorphy?) in relation to their encompassing taxon. Also I think it would make browsing through the different catfish a lot more fun.

Three problems:

1. There are very few resolved phylogenetic trees within the Siluriformes.

2. How would one address conflicting tree topologies from different datasets?

3. Most of the morphological characters typically used in a phylogenetic analysis are of little meaning/use to an aquarist. If you have a molecular phylogeny, how do you even list the apomorphies?