Can I download every animal name and brief info about it?

Development API
1

I am trying to improve my Python and want to make a hangman game using every animal name and then tell the person playing something interesting about the animal.

Is it possible to download every animal name and brief info about it?
If not, what is the most I am allowed to download?

Thank you!

2

Hi, @SpaceAlien ! Thanks for checking. We have a few data services that will provide that kind of thing. In general, we ask that you hit any API at most 1x per second.

When you say “every animal name”, that would be more than a million, most of them with only latin names available, including lots and lots of beetles. If that’s not exactly what you’re after, you can get latin and common names and EOL page IDs for, eg., all the frogs & toads, with a query like this. You’ll need to be registered on the EOL website to access the “download tsv” button for that search interface. You might want to just download some selected animal groups that your players will find interesting.

With an EOL page ID, you can access any of our species level data services. For a fairly consistent bit of text about each, I would recommend the Autogenerated text service, which provides the snippet near the top of each EOL species page.

Let me know if that doesn’t help!

Jen

3

Thank you. I searched on your site and it says “there are 10971 species of mammals” but I still don’t understand how to download that list of names, if I am allowed to.

Can you please explain in detail how to do it? I hit download before but nothing happened. It said it would take a few minutes but even after 1/2 hour nothing happened.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

4

I’m sorry for the delay, @SpaceAlien - I must have missed a notification. Can you send me a link to your EOL user page? I’ll check on the status of your download. We performed some hasty maintenance a couple of weeks ago that may have come at just the wrong time and interrupted the download worker.

Jen

5

Sorry took a trip and don’t have access until I return on Tuesday. I will answer you then. Sorry.

Thanks,
Markis

6

Profile - SpaceAlien - EOL Discussion Forums - is that what you mean?

7

Sorry that was unclear- I meant in the https://eol.org/ interface. When you’re logged in, there should be a link to your user page in the main menu that you can reach in the upper left corner of any page.

8

Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org)

I see some results, but I don’t see how I can use it. I can’t make a .xls (comma delimited file) out of it to get the names or can I?

Thanks,
Markis

1 Like
9

Your two EOL downloads are .tsv files and can be opened directly in excel if that’s your preference.

The GBIF query can be downloaded from the url at the end of the text file linked from that section (look for “downloadLink” toward the bottom of the text file) but if you’re after a list of names, you won’t need that one. It will be a list of all the occurrence records for all the species in your query.

:slight_smile:
Jen

1 Like
10

Sorry for late reply, trying to find job. I could not figure out how to download into excel the list of mammals.