Morphpedia is a new knowledge base of herp traits, genes and localities. In the last two months we've added 192 published articles. This week our team released version 1.2.

11 Categories in Development

The initial launch focused on Ball Pythons, but now we've really opened things up and have 11 categories "in development". This means that we've auto-generated trait articles from the MorphMarket database, but are editing and enhancing those articles in our forums before publishing them. We need your help to finish them out, so please come and contribute photos and information.

Meta Tags

Tags, like "Leucism" are used to group related traits and facilitate your exploration and learning. This week we added two special tags: "Issues" and "Complexes". They're special because they're automatically generated based on other data.

• Issues - a tag to quickly see all traits with some kind of documented issue.
• Complexes - a tag to quickly see all traits which are identified in a genetic complex.

Relative Availability Trends

Availability is our term that refers to the supply of animals for sale on MorphMarket with this trait. Relative availability indicates how this trait ranked against other traits at that time. For example, a value of 75 would mean that this trait had an equal or higher availability than 75% of all available traits.

Most traits now have relative availability graphs which show how availability has trended over the past 5 years.

We've haven't explored the results completely, but here are a few interesting availability trends we saw in Ball Pythons:

• Uptrends: Acid, Red Stripe, Redhead
• Down trends: Het Daddy, Bengal, Desert
• Other interesting patterns: Wookie, Static, GeneX

Some details:

• We do not yet combine data across aliases of a trait. For example, in Morphpedia we recognize Coral Glow as an alias to Banana, but the market data is not yet combined in this way.
• Data may be less reliable prior to the date these genes were added to our marketplace. While our site attempts to automatically tag older ads, it cannot do so in all cases. But this will improve over time.

Remember that these graphs show supply, not price or demand. Also, data always require interpretation. It's up to you to figure out what it means.

Conclusion

There's a lot of exciting projects going on at MorphMarket right now, and we couldn't be more pleased with how Morphpedia is going so far. But we need your help! Please visit Morphpedia.com to learn about these amazing animals and to contribute your knowledge to the community.