When biologist E.O. Wilson won the TED Prize in 2007, he wished that we all “work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity.” With that, the Encyclopedia of Life began the outrageous task of cataloguing all of the Earth’s known species.

Cynthia Parr spoke at TED2012 to give updates on the Encyclopedia, which now has well over a million entries — 1,112,395 to be exact. And the Encyclopedia has found a new way for the average Joe or Josephine to get to know new species — with beautifully curated Pinterest pages. Because we love their color-coded albums, below find just a few of the amazing creatures that be found in the collections “Ruby Red,” “Mellow Yellow” and “Life is Blue.”

Scarlet Hood, or Hygrocybe coccinea, are mushrooms that grow to just two inches and can be found at the base of redwood trees. These little guys are edible, but they may not be the yummiest.

From the Scarlet Hood to the Scarlet Ibis, this bird, Eudocimus ruber, is a nomadic South American species. The Scarlet Ibis can live to be 20-years-old.

The Cardinal Beetle, or Pyrochroa coccinea, uses its red wings as a warning to show predators its toxicity. Look for it on flowers at the edge of the woods.

Catch this flowering cactus, the Claret-cup Cactus (Echinocereus coccineus) when it blooms for two to three days during the Spring.

Panamanian golden frogs, Atelopus zeteki, have green eyes, yellow-orange backs, and black spots. This colorful amphibian is critically endangered, with over 80% of its population disappearing in the past 10 years.

The Polymita picta, also known as the Cuban Land Snail, attracts mates using love darts, a kind of small arrow produced by the snail itself in the seduction process.

Look for this sunflower in Illinois, where it was introduced by American Indians prior to European settlement. Helianthus annuus, meaning annual sunflower from the Latin, is a popular pollinating site for honeybees.

Holacanthus clarionensis, better known as the angelfish, is endemic to the Eastern Pacific with populations originating from near the Baja California Peninsula. Measuring on average 20 centimeters in length, angelfish stretch about the same distance as a fork.

The Common Lobster is a scavenger who uses its claws to eat. The Homarus gammarus finds its home in mud burrows and can live up to 15 years.

This sea ascidian grows in Bali, Indonesia, and goes by the formal name Rhopalaea morph translucent blue.

Find this Fairy Bluebird, also known as the Irena puella, in the Himalayan foothills. Its diet consists of fruit, nectar and a few bugs.

This native freshwater Amazonian fish is known as the Discus fish (Symphysodon aequifasciata). Both parents of the Discus larvae care for their young.

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This blog post was a tag-team effort between Shirin Samimi-Moore, who curated the red and blue collections, and Liz Jacobs, who created the yellow collection.

Photo credits for red species:

• Hygrocybe coccinea: JC Schou
• Eudocimus ruber: Frank Kramer
• Pyrochroa coccinea: Stanislav Krejcik
• Echinocereus coccineus: Robert Sivinski

Photo credits for yellow species:

• Atelopus zeteki: Brian Gratwicke
• Polymita picta: Michael Kesl
• Helianths annus: 3266zauber
• Holacanthus clarionensis: Ross Robertson

Photo credits for blue species:

• Homarus gammarus: N Sloth
• Rhopalaea morph translucent blue: Arjan Gittenberger
• Irena puella: Public Domain
• Symphysodon aequifasciata: Patrick Farrelly

The Encyclopaedia Britannica may have ceased printing earlier this year, ending a 244-year run. But the Encyclopedia of Life is just getting started. An ambitious initiative to catalogue all the known species on planet Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life was inaugurated by famed biologist E.O. Wilson when he won the TED Prize in 2007 and issued this wish for the world, “I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity.” Check out his moving TEDTalk on the wish.

At TED2012, Cynthia Parr gave an update on the Encyclopedia, revealing that the number of species catalogued had almost reached a million. But additions have grown swiftly since then. As of this afternoon 1,110,940 species have been documented through the project.

Below, some of the most interesting recent entries.

Behold a newly discovered species of chameleon, the Brookesia modern, that is so small it can fit on the head of a match. You’ll find this little guy on an island off Madagascar, Nosy Hara.

Meet Frullania knightbridgei, a newly discovered type of liverwort. Discovered on Rakiura/Stewart Island in New Zealand — which is known for its high levels of rainfall — this plants soaks up water around it like a sponge.

A new species of spider has been discovered in Auburn, Alabama. When it came time to name it, the research team showed their football loyalty, calling it the Auburn Tiger Trapdoor spider.

Spigelia sp. Popovkin 602 is a plant with pink and white flowers that does something very unusual with its seeds — its branches bend down and bury them. Also fascinating — the plant was discovered in Brazil by a local handyman.

Potamites montanicola, a newly discovered species of lizard, isn’t just notable for its beautiful coloring. The lizard is the only of its genus known to live in mountainous environments, leading scientists to question how the heck it maintains its body temperature through the cold nights.

Photo credits:

• Brookesia modern: Glaw F, Köhler J, Townsend TM, Vences M
• Frullania knightbridgei: Matt von Konrat, Peter de Lange, Matt Greif, Lynika Strozier, Jörn Hentschel, Jochen Heinrichs
• Auburn Tiger Trapdoor spider: Jason E. Bond, Chris A. Hamilton, Nicole L. Garrison, Charles H. Ray
• Spigelia sp. Popovkin 602: Alex Popovkin
• Potamites montanicola: Germán Chávez, Diego Vásquez

E.O. Wilson was awarded the TED Prize in 2007. Who should win the $1 million prize in 2013? Head to TEDPrize.org to make a nomination. The nomination process closes on August 31.

The evening paid tribute to legendary biologist (and beloved TED Prize winner) E.O Wilson, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, but the program was really a love letter to science itself — for its importance, yes, but also for the inspiration and wonder it offers, and for its deep but often-unacknowledged kinship with the arts.

“Tonight, science and art, long-lost lovers, reunite” Alan Alda said, as he opened the show. And that sensibility pervaded the program, as it blended science and the arts in innovative and unusual ways — from a sequence of broadway musical stars singing light-hearted tributes to science (For example, a guided tour of the periodic table, set to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “I am the very model of a modern major general”. Brilliant!) to an intellectual pas de deux, featuring Brian Greene waxing eloquent on the nature of the universe, and Joshua Bell performing lyrically on the violin.

The evening included several heartfelt odes to Wilson — the transcendent cellist YoYo Ma performed playfully as young “ants” wiggle-danced around him (Wilson’s career was built on his research on ants); Anna Deavere Smith impersonated Wilson as only she could. And Nobel winner James Watson (of Watson & Crick double-helix fame) paid homage in his own eccentric way: “When we first met, Ed thought I was the most unpleasant person he’d ever known,” Watson explained to a chuckling audience. “And when I first met Ed, I didn’t think there was any point in knowing him. Because everyone knew: Biology was the dumb part of science.”

READ MORE: The NY premiere of Frans Lanting’s LIFE, live performance of the Philip Glass score and Wilson’s central message.

Photos: Robert Leslie. Courtesy WSFWatson and Wilson ultimately became great friends and colleagues. And Watson conceded, in his endearing curmudgeonly way: “We should all be happy that he hasn’t died prematurely.”

The centerpiece of the evening was the soaring New York premiere of Frans Lanting’s, “LIFE: A Journey Through Time.” The multimedia performance sets Lanting’s extraordinary images of the natural world to a Philip Glass score, performed live by the St Luke’s Orchestra and conducted by creative collaborator Marin Alsop.

Lanting, a National Geographic photographer and poet on the side, presented an early version of the LIFE project at TED2005, and it’s extraordinary to mark its progress and evolution. LIFE is now a book and traveling exhibit, as well as a live performance. It captures the beauty and drama of the natural world through a choreographed collage of contrast and color, pattern and motion. A tiny gazelle at the foot of an elephant; a lion half-hidden in twilight grass; a dove soaring; a frog staring; insects, amoebas, volcanoes, sand dunes. Stunningly beautiful, it leaves the audience struck by both the unity and diversity of life.

And the powerful live performance underscored Wilson’s central messages: The beauty and interconnectedness of life, and our urgent need to engage the broader public with the natural world. During a short speech at the reception following the event, Wilson called on everyone to rise to this challenge. “Entire species are slipping away, and we’re just nattering on,” Wilson said. “We must turn our attention to the natural world. And we need everyone’s attention.”

Photos: Robert Leslie. Courtesy WSF

To reach Edward O. Wilson’s office on the Harvard campus, one must first push through a door with a sign warning the public not to enter. Then, enter a creaky old elevator and press two buttons simultaneously. This counterintuitive procedure transports one into a strange realm. It is a space that holds the world’s largest collection of ants, some 14,000 species. Curators are checking the drawers, dominated by the tall figure of Dr. Wilson, who is trying to contain his excitement: the 14,001st ant species has just been discovered in the soils of a Brazilian forest…

Continue reading the insightful story by the New York Times (or watch E.O. Wilson’s 2007 TED Prize speech on the Encyclopedia of Life, which is featured in the NYT article).

Plus: Andrew C. Revkin writes about E.O. Wilson’s visit to the New York Times offices on the NYTimes blog Dot Earth.

+ In 2007, biologist E.O. Wilson wished that we would help him build a comprehensive catalog of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life launched this spring and is growing — with many ways for both scientists and non-scientists to contribute. Create an account on the site to hear about the latest updates and opportunities — including the debut of a tool for uploading your own photos. Find out more about The Encyclopedia of Life and EOL.org>>

+ In 2005, photographer Edward Burtynsky wished for new ways to teach kids about environmental stewardship. Working with WGBH in Boston, his web cartoon show, The Greens, just celebrated its first anniversary and seventh episode. Watch shows online and download art and music, take a movie quiz and share the site with kids you know. Find out more about The Greens >>

+ At TED2008, physicist Neil Turok wished for the TED community’s help in developing math and sciences talent all over Africa, though the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). Our next Einstein, he says, could be African. At NextEinstein.org, learn more about AIMS, watch video interviews with students, and find many ways to help in this drive to open 15 math and sciences academies in Africa and fund scholarships for the best and the brightest on the continent. Find out more about NextEinstein.org >>

+ in 2008, writer and activist Dave Eggers gave a hilarious TED Prize talk about his wish: that we will all become personally involved in our local schools, and tell a story about it. Whether you volunteer with a chapter of Dave’s 826 National foundation, or on your own, sign in at OnceUponASchool.org and share your story. Find out more about OnceUponASchool.org >>

+ In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim made an audacious wish: to connect the world for one day through the power of film. Last weekend’s Pangea Day was a moving 4-hour festival — and you can replay the day on PangeaDay.org. Watch the films, speakers and music you missed, find ways to take action, and discuss each film on the site (click on “Comments” to expand the discussion). Find out more about PangeaDay.org >>

+ In 2006, Cameron Sinclair asked TED to help him build an open-source platform to help architects connect with communities in need of designs. The result was the Open Architecture Network — a successful website that acts as both a clearinghouse for building plans and a vibrant social network, allows its users to sample, remix and customize design work for their needs. To help Sinclair’s wish come true, join the community at the Open Architecture Network’s website.

+ In 2006, Dr. Larry Brilliant wished to start a global early warning system to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The organization that grew out of this wish, Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD) is a venue for humanitarian collaboration with a focus on those involved in disease tracking and disaster response. You can help Dr. Brilliant now by test-driving an alpha version of their crisis assistance directory.

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg — and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about “the bottom billion.”

See the full list of 100 >>

The beautiful film that helped launch the Encyclopedia of Life has been nominated for a 2008 Webby Award. Created by Avenue A | Razorfish, the film is just one outcome of E.O. Wilson’s 2007 TED Prize wish: to “help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life.” You can watch the video on the Webby Award player and cast your vote >>

The New York Times has a great story giving more background on this wish >>

(Please note — the site is going to be very busy tonight!)

Moyers is a great interviewer. At a certain point, he asks Wilson: why should we care if the woodpecker goes? I mean, we’ve lost—how many species have we lost?

Wilson: How many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem like a pond, a patch of forest, a little bit of marine shallow environments, the more you take out the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or a fire, it is less likely that that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. So it becomes less stable with fewer species. And then we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it’s not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It’s less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn’t it? And more than that: we lose the services of these species.

Moyers: The services of these species.

Wilson: Yes, services of these species to us. Like pollination and water purification.

Moyers: That we get free from nature.

Wilson: Yeah. Here’s an easy way to remember it.

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Transcript: E.O. Wilson, TED2007

E.O. Wilson: TED Prize wish: Help build the Encyclopedia of Life

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/83

To watch this TEDTalk, download it or comment on it, and to view many more TEDTalks, visit http://www.ted.com

As for TED, I have all my life wondered what mind-boggling meant. After two days here, I declare myself boggled, and enormously impressed. And feel that you are one of the great hopes not just for American achievement in science and technology but for the whole world.
I’ve come, however, on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, which are the 10-to-the-18th-power insects, that’s a million trillion insects and other small creatures, and to make a plea for them.
Please keep in mind that if we were to wipe out insects alone, just that group alone, on this planet, which we are trying hard to do, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land — and within a few months.
How did I come to this particular position of advocacy? As a little boy, and through my teenage years, I because increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life. I had a butterfly period, a snake period, a bird period, a fish period, a cave period and, finally and definitively, an ant period. By my college years, I was a devoted myrmecologist, a specialist in the biology of ants, but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on Earth in general, including all that it means to us as a species, how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it. Out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition crystallized in the wish that I’m about to make to you.
My choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, on the Florida peninsula. As far back as I can remember, I was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region, and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there. One day when I was only 7 years old and fishing, I pulled a pinfish, they’re called, with sharp dorsal spines, up too hard and fast, and I blinded myself in one eye. I later discovered I was also hard of hearing, possibly congenitally, in the upper registers. So in planning to be a professional naturalist (I never considered anything else in my entire life), I found that I was lousy at birdwatching, couldn’t track frog calls either, so I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystem, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world. In so doing, I reached a frontier of biology so strange, so rich, that it seemed as though it exists on another planet.
In fact, we live on a mostly unexplored planet. The great majority of organisms on earth remain unknown to science. In the last 30 years, thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology, biologists have, for example, added a full one-third of the known frog and amphibian species, to bring the current total to 5,400, and more continue to pour in. Two new kinds of whales have been discovered, along with two new antelopes, dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant and even a distinct kind of gorilla.
At the extreme opposite end of the size scale, the class of marine bacteria the Prochlorococci (that will be on the final exam), although discovered only in 1988, are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on earth, and moreover responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean. These bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all earth’s organisms, so minute that they cannot be seen with conventional optical microscopy. Yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures.
These examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet. Consider the fungi, including mushrooms, rusks, molds and many disease-causing organisms. Sixty thousand species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist. Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms. About 16 thousand species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by science; there could be hundreds of thousands of them, even millions still unknown.
This vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria, which within just the last several years still were known from only about six thousand species of bacteria worldwide — but that number of bacteria species can be found in 1 gram of soil, just a little handful of soil, in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there. It’s been estimated that a single ton of soil, fertile soil, contains approximately 4 million species of bacteria, all unknown.
So the question is, what are they all doing?
The fact is, we don’t know. We are living on a planet with a lot of activities with reference to our living environment done by faith and guess alone. Our lives depend upon these creatures. There are, to take an example close to home, there are over 500 species of bacteria now known, friendly bacteria, living symbiotically in your mouth and throat, probably necessary to your health or holding off pathogenic bacteria.
[Film]
["I'm assisted in this by Billie Holiday."]
And that may be just the beginning. The viruses, those quasi organisms among which are the prophasias, the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria, are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology, a world unto themselves. What constitutes a viral species is still unresolved, although they’re obviously of enormous importance to us. But this much we can say: the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds or is likely to exceed that in all of terrestrial life combined.
Nowadays, in addressing microbial biodiversity, scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the Pacific Ocean. But that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology. Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours. Soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs, to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat’s surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars.
What will we find when we map the living world? As finally we get this under way seriously, as we move past the relatively gigantic mammals, birds, frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond, to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity, already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose instead two great domains of microorganisms: true bacteria and one-celled organisms, the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.
Some serious biologists, and I count myself among them, have begin to wonder that, among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms, one might — just might — find aliens among them, true aliens, stocks that arrived from outer space (they’ve have billions of years to do it) but especially during the earliest years of biological evolution on this planet. We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origins are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the Pyrex vessel around the growing population of bacteria.
There may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other. But each of these species, even the tiniest of the aforementioned Prochlorococci, are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands and millions of years, each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence, and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy.
My own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953, while a Harvard graduate student, searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of Cuba, ants that would shine in the sunlight, metallic green or metallic blue and one species, I discovered, metallic gold. I found my magical ants, but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native Cuban forests hung on, and were then and still are being cut back. I realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique, marvelous plants and animals on that island — and this is true of practically every part of the world — which took millions of years to evolve are in the process of disappearing forever. And so it is everywhere one looks. The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth’s ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym HIPPO:
H is for Habitat destruction, including climate change by greenhouse gases; I is for the Invasive species like the fire ants, zebra mussels, broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country at an exponential rate, that’s the I; the P, the first one in HIPPO, is for Pollution; the second P is for continued Population, human population expansion, and the final letter is O, is for Overharvesting, driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing.
The HIPPO juggernaut we have created, if unabated, is destined (according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research) to reduce half of Earth’s still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century. Human-forced climate change alone, again if unabated, could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades. What will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded? Huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered, much of our environmental stability, and new kinds of pharmaceutical and new products of unimaginable strength and value, all thrown away. The loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth, security, and yes, spirituality for all time to come — because previous cataclysms of this kind (the last one ended the age of dinosaurs) take, or took normally, 5 to 10 million years to repair.
Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. For example, even in the United States, the two hundred thousand species known currently — which actually has found to be only partial in coverage — is mostly unknown to us in basic biology. Only about 15 percent of the known species has been studied well enough to evaluate their status. Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as “in peril,” that is, in danger of extinction, that’s in the United States.
We are, in short, flying blind into our communal future. We urgently need to change this. We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. We need to settle down before we wreck the planet, and we need that knowledge. This is the project [inaudible] equivalent to the Human Genome Project. It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable.
So this brings me to my wish, TEDsters, and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk:
I wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity. And let us call it the Encyclopedia of Life.
What is the Encyclopedia of Life, a concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously?
It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. Amateurs can do it also. It has an infinitely expandable page for each species. It makes all key information about life on earth accessible to anyone on demand anywhere in the world.
I’ve written about this idea before, and I know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past.
But what excites me is that since I first put forward this particular idea in that form, science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicality of making such an encyclopedia, regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it, are within reach — have made reality within reach. Indeed, in the past year a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream. I wish you would help them.
Working together, we can make this real. The encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications. It will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness, and sense of human need, and it will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. And most of all, it can inspire.