Only 14 percent of Earth's species have been discovered | Hacker News Reader

Only 14 percent of Earth's species have been discovered

news.nationalgeographic.com

41 pointsarocks20 comments

A thought:

This summer, I gave myself the goal of photographing every kind of wildflower in my area. It turned out to be quite a large project; I ended up with about 6000 images of perhaps 130 species.

When I started, I figured the big question I would be answering would be this:

- Here is a plant; what species is it?

But as I progressed, I found myself confronted with the surprising difficulty of answering a somewhat different question:

- Here are two plants; are they the same species?

This article suggests yet a third question:

- Here is a plant; is it a known species?

It is interesting to think that, for some of my 6000 images, the answer may just be "no".

Who has counted the remaining 86%?

"Worm's team estimated the total number of genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla—a designation above class—in each kingdom. That's a relatively easy task, since the number of new examples in these categories has leveled off in recent decades.

By contrast, the number of newly discovered species continues to rise sharply.

Using complex statistics, Worm and colleagues used the number of genera, families, and so on to predict Earth's number of unknown species, and their calculations gave them a number: 8.7 million."

There are also techniques from "metagenomics" where environmental samples are taken from ocean water captured in filters and dna-sequenced en-masse (see "Global Ocean Sampling"). It is then possible to statistically infer the number of distinct species by analyzing the sequence data.

This was first attempted in the Sargasso Sea which had been thought to be relatively sparse in microbial diversity. Instead, it was found to have a shocking number of entirely new microbial species.

The scary thing is not simply that species are going extinct, but that species which we may never know of may go extinct in the near future.

I'm trying to grasp what you mean by scary in this context.

We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it.

> We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it.

That's not my interpretation. In any event, species have been going extinct for almost as long as there have been species. It's unclear that we've appreciably changed the extinction.

And, while one may be scared by species extinction, it's how things work. (I'm scared of height, but that doesn't imply that someone should do something about height.)

BTW - we've probably preserved and enabled species, especially at the low-end, that would have otherwise gone extinct or never come into being.

I was just thinking in the line of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?".

Why should we feel bad if a species comes and goes without we ever knowing about it? Isn't that expected and natural? Doesn't that happen all the time in the universe?

Sure, it happens all the time and has happened since before humans existed. The concern is about how much extinction humans are CAUSING. Given that extinctions can impact entire ecosystems, we (as a species) should be worried about the impact we're having on other species, if only for our own selfish reasons.

The fact that there are species that we don't even know about means there is still a lot to learn about life on Earth. It is generally a bad idea to aggressively mess around with a system that is not well-understood, that is what we're doing and this news items demonstrates how little we actually know about our ecosystem.

For our own selfish reasons, we should get better at designing and building ecosystems, instead of expending resources on discovering, categorizing, and protecting unknown species. The former gives us a better future, whereas the latter produces mostly a constant state of guilt about not doing enough.

For example, I am appalled at how we still farm outdoors, where we have little control over pests and weather, especially given that our main methods of pest control tend to hurt us, such as through chemicals or through Monsanto-style genetic modification and patenting. We could begin to move in a completely new direction, and that is to create something like the Ultima Tower, as envisioned by Eugene Tsui.

It's clear that if we don't take grand steps towards engineering a sustainable future, we won't be able to survive a variety of calamities to which we are now exposed, and in that grand scheme, untold numbers of species dying, whether at our hands or due to our carelessness, is irrelevant.

http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui

Just when you think that we have become masters of our own domain something like this comes along. It truly is hard to imagine that with all our technology, all our exploration, we have only just begun to understand our own world.

How many of these unknown species exist in places we cannot yet go? The deep sea, namely.

>How many of these unknown species exist in places we cannot yet go? The deep sea, namely.

I've thought the same while seeing The Blue Planet. It's interesting that we seem to be more interested in exploring the galaxy than the deepest depths of our oceans.

I think part of that is that due to the immense pressures and other factors it's almost easier to explore the galaxy.

I'm well aware but it seems we're more willing to find a way into space than into the ocean depths. If we found it more important, we would've developed a better way to explore the deep blue.

I think we've come to understand that whatever we perceive to be greater than us from what exists beyond the clouds.

In another comment on this thread, in another context, I mentioned the architect, Eugene Tsui. He designed a house based on the tardigrade, which is apparently "the world's most durable organism". This relates to your comment because one way to study the oceans is to use examples from other species, such as the tardigrade, a tiny animal which "can withstand pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, which is nearly six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench." We should be able to figure out how they can do this, and then apply the knowledge to our explorations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui

It's not an either/or situation. There is active work in both areas.

It is when it comes to money.

The original paper is available via the open access journal PLoS: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...

Also worth reading is Robert May's commentary "Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss?" http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...

They'll be extinct before they get counted

Everyday, that % is going up... not always because we're discovering new ones everyday, but because everyday 300 species die off because of the destruction we cause.

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