The Cifonauta database was officially launched on September 26th of 2011 (last year). So, today it celebrates its first year of public life.
However, the idea of creating an image database for marine biodiversity is much older than that.
Photographic documentation is an essential part of research. During the past 30 years, a lot of material has been collected and studied at the CEBIMar.
The common destinations for this content are usually specialized journals and outreach activities, such as courses, brochures, and lectures. However, only a small part of this material is published; the rest is never made public.
These are photos and videos collected for decades. They represent the diversity of marine life along the North Coast of São Paulo. It’s a rich and valuable material. How can we explore its potential for science outreach?
The first version of CEBIMar‘s website already contained a hand-curated gallery of photos of marine organisms, sorted by taxonomic classification, as an attempt to promote the organisms documented there.
The second version of the site also included an even larger gallery with about 1,000 photos. However, it was still too small for the volume of material in the CEBIMar archives.
Finally, the opportunity arose. A call for outreach proposals from CNPq turned the idea into a concrete plan. Our proposal was granted and we created the Cifonauta database.
The idea is simple. An image database for marine biology showcasing the scientific production of CEBIMar’s own researchers. Specialists whose knowledge allows them to enrich the images with additional information such as taxonomic classification, habitat, life stage, lifestyle, size, geolocation, imaging technique, etc.
With such rich metadata, it provides not only accurate information about the organisms but also allows filtering the contents of the database by combining these tags.
Another distinguishing feature of the Cifonauta database is that we don’t publish only the best photo of each creature. A photo is a snapshot in space and time. But an organism is a complex, three-dimensional being. That’s why we include several images of different angles of the same organism.
Some examples are the images of Chromodoris paulomarcioi and Clypeaster subdepressus from the A Sea Biscuit’s Life.
Another recent example of the database’s usefulness came from CEBIMar’s researchers of meiofauna, organisms that live between grains of sand. They produced a fantastic movie called Life Between Grains and added all the photos and videos they used to Cifonauta. There are 538 photos and 167 videos documenting the biology of these organisms. Tardigrades, mites, nematodes, polychaetes, kinorhynchs, gastrotrichs, mollusks, and more!
Not everyone has had the opportunity to see a gastrotrich walking around… but now everyone can. This is the mission of the Cifonauta database.
Reply by Email
or