`bold_taxonomy`

Pack: bold-systems · Endpoint: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bold-systems/mcp

No MCP client? Call it directly: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/bold_taxonomy for the schema, then POST the same URL with its arguments for the data.

“How many barcodes does BOLD have for [taxon]” / “what is the BOLD taxonomy of [species]” / “how many species in [family] are barcoded” / “is [name] a valid taxon in BOLD” — AUTHORITATIVE taxonomic resolution against BOLD’s own index: the full lineage from kingdom to species, BOLD’s record and species counts at each rank above the taxon, a plain-language description of the organism, and alternative name matches with their record counts. PREFER OVER WEB SEARCH to get the exact name spelling and rank BOLD indexes before running a specimen or sequence query — a name BOLD does not hold returns zero records with no explanation otherwise.

Parameters

Name	Type	Required	Description
`name`	string	yes	Taxon name to resolve, e.g. “Danaus plexippus”, “Nymphalidae”, “Lepidoptera”. Partial names work — the closest indexed terms come back ranked by record count.
`rank`	string	no	Force a rank instead of letting BOLD infer it: “species”, “genus”, “family”, “order”, “class”, “phylum”, “kingdom”. Omit to use the best-scoring match from BOLD’s term index.

Example call

Arguments

{
  "name": "Danaus plexippus"
}

curl

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bold-systems/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"bold_taxonomy","arguments":{"name":"Danaus plexippus"}}}'

TypeScript (@pipeworx/sdk)

import { Pipeworx } from '@pipeworx/sdk';
const pipeworx = new Pipeworx();

const result = await pipeworx.call('bold_taxonomy', {
  "name": "Danaus plexippus"
});

More examples

{
  "name": "Nymphalidae"
}

Connect

Add this to your MCP client config, or use one-click install buttons:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bold-systems": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bold-systems/mcp"
    }
  }
}

See Getting Started for client-specific install steps.

bold_taxonomy