An explanation might be appropriate for the species
identification used in this website. In a classical system,
a kind of tree is used
where the "leaves" are the species and the nodes ("branches")
are the morphological features on which a group of species is
split in two or more groups.
But the consequence of this system is the difficulty to
name a species of which you're unsure of one or more features,
somewhere in the middle of the tree.
But a computer assisted determination can be done in a
different way. Morphological features that you cannot
find or distinguish are simply not taken into account. The
result is still a species determination, but with a certain
probability.
One disadvantage of this system (or at least the system used
here), is that some features are more important to classify
a species than another. This parameter is not used in the
current program. A future optimisation might be to put
a weight on certain keys.
The keys used for this Betta identification are found in the
book "Aqualog: All labyrinths".
Comments on better keys are welcome
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Example of a classical identification
A good article on fish identification can be found
here
(Of Pickled Fish and Ichthyological Sleuthing: A Primer For the Advanced Aquarist
Part I: The Whys and Wherefores of Scientific Nomenclature, by Wayne Leibel, 1985).
and here
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