August 29, 2011
People share this planet with at least 8.7 million different forms of life, according to a study considered the most accurate done so far.
Researchers who have analyzed the hierarchical categorization of life have realized that life is not equally divided between land and water. They have understood that many species will be extinct before humans have studied them. This problem is urgent. We are losing species due to human activity, and we will not understand for a long time which species we are losing, said Dr. Camilo Mora from the University of Hawaii.
The authors also managed to understand which species may have gone extinct and have not yet been described by biologists, just by studying existing data on 1.2 million species, and by comparing the commonalities among them, the missing development rings, as well as the differences.
Robert May, a former British science advisor, stated that this new effort, like the previous ones, is based on incomplete data. But, according to him, the conclusions are reasonable.
This species count, like those before it, cannot be the final word. There are plenty of unknowns in the catalog of life, said Rob Dunn, the author of Every Living Thing.
The truth is, according to him, that we are still very ignorant.
We still do not have a complete inventory of a tropical forest in the world, not even of a single hectare of forest.
298,000 plant species
611,000 fungal species
36,400 protozoan species single-celled organisms
27,500 algae species
Researchers could not even approximately count the number of bacteria.
75% of the 8.7 million species, most of which are insects, live on land;
25% or approximately 2.2 million live in water.
86% of all plants and animals on land and 91% of those in the sea have still not been cataloged and named. 250 years ago, taxonomy was invented, the system of categorizing species by Carl Linnaeus. Read more at: