When a scientist finds a beetle, a fish or a fern, they write down what it was and where they found it.
Put millions of those notes together and you get a picture of what lives where. There is a big free website that does exactly this for the whole world.
I went to look at what it holds for the Philippines.
First, A Catch
The website has 3,886,391 Philippine records. But they do not all come with the same rules.
Some you can use for anything. Some you must credit. Some you may not use to make money.
Only 1,060,583 come with no rules at all — 27.29% of them. Everything below is about those, and leaving out the rest throws away 72.71% of what is there.
Now The Strange Part
Somebody has to upload each record. I looked at which country they uploaded it from.
American institutions uploaded 66.7% of the Philippine records. Belgium and the Netherlands come next. Three countries between them hold 94.9%.
Philippine institutions uploaded 5,016. That is 0.47%, and it puts the Philippines 6th on the list — behind Switzerland, a country with no sea and no rainforest.
Why That Is
81.1% of these records are museum specimens: an actual dead plant or animal in a drawer somewhere.
Only 13,655 are somebody seeing a living thing and writing it down.
And a lot of the collecting happened a long time ago. There are 52,548 records from 1908 alone. Those drawers are mostly not in Manila.
One Record Says 1612
While counting, I found a beetle recorded as collected in 1612.
That cannot be right. Nobody named that kind of beetle until 1842.
The website does check for silly dates — 119 Philippine records are marked for it. This one is not marked. It flags four other problems with the same record, just not the date.
So I set my own cut-off at the year 1700 and listed anything older separately instead of quietly drawing it on a chart.
Where People Actually Looked
Only 50.9% of the records say where they were found. For those, I counted how many fall in each small square of the map.
30.5% of them are in one square. The top ten squares hold 48.6%.
And 400 squares out of 864 hold nothing at all. Some of that is open sea. Not all of it.
But That Big Square Is One Trip
I looked at what is inside the busiest square. It is Tubbataha Reefs, out in the Sulu Sea, and 99.4% of what is there came from a single expedition in April 2023.
They did not catch anything. They filtered seawater and read the DNA floating in it. One method, one reef, one month — 163,186 records.
That one trip is also 96.6% of the biggest year in the whole record. So the busiest year is not a sign that people are collecting more. It is one boat with a very good filter.
An empty square does not mean nothing lives there. It means nobody went and wrote it down.
How I Counted Without Downloading Anything
You cannot download a million records from that website unless you make an account. I did not want to.
But you can ask it "how many?" as often as you like, free, no sign-up. So I asked 1,764 small questions instead of asking for one big file. Every square on that map is one question.
Three Things I Cannot Tell You
Who owns any of it. I counted who uploaded the record, not who owns the specimen. A beetle caught in Luzon and kept in Leiden counts as Dutch here.
What lives where. This is a map of where people looked, not of where things live.
Anything about a single record. I only have counts. I never held the rows.
Want to see all the charts and data tables?
View the Full Analysis →