A man in a light blue shirt and khaki pants crouches in a wooded area, examining a plant.
Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor here at the Florida Museum, collaborated with LabX’s Marketing Manager Nawar Nemeh on a series of fun, short videos about the Tree of Life, how it helps researchers and what we can learn by examining it.

Check out the YouTube playlist where we collected these fun LabX video shorts:

Some fun topics

Learn about carnivorous plants, flamingos, water lilies and fungi! What is a cryptic species? What is the oldest lineage of animals? And what are myxozoans? Skip the playlist and jump to a topic you’re curious about:

YouTube playlist for 'Tree of Life | Doug Soltis + LabX @ The National...' by Florida Museum, featuring 14 videos.Episode 1: Tree of Life

Episode 2: Elephants & Manatees

Episode 3: Bacterial World

Episode 4: Falcons & Hawks

Episode 5: Carnivorous Plants

Episode 6: Water Lilies

Episode 7: Myxozoans

Episode 8: Cryptic Species

Episode 9: Comb Jellies

Episode 10: Flatfish

Episode 11: Fungus

Episode 12: Flamingos

Episode 13: Rhinos

Episode 14: Hippos

What is the Tree of Life?

The Tree of Life is really a family tree for all of the species that are on our planet, showing us how they’re related to each other. Right now, there are 2.3 million species that are in that Tree of Life, but there are probably 10 million more species that remain undescribed and unnamed that have yet to be added.

Understanding the Tree of Life can help us cure diseases, develop medicines and improve crops. It can even help us do things like predict how plants and animals are going to move in response to climate change because closely related species often respond similarly to shifting conditions in their environment.

Zoom in on the Tree!

The tree in the background of these videos was created as part of the One Tree, One Planet project, and you can move around in the tree with the OneZoom explorer.

Creative Science Team

LabX is a program of the National Academy of Sciences. Their goal: Bold experiments with a variety of creative—sometimes even unorthodox—approaches designed to reach diverse audiences. Check out more of this team’s work:

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