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Finding Every Species
Microsofts slave writes "A hugely ambitious project to find and name every species on Earth within the next 25 years has been launched by scientists. The internet and the development of DNA sequencing technology make the goal achievable, they say."
When will they find bigfoot?
'Facts' like this that can neither be proven nor disproven are often used by people with an agenda.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
We can't even get to where most species *are* yet.
And while I agree that taxonomy is an important part of biological science, cataloging life isn't the *point* of taxonomy. It might be rather more to the point to *preserve* these species, or at least their DNA (male and female, and put them, into the ark. Riiiiight)
Honestly, I *do* understand what they're trying to do here, but it has an odd, and rather pathetic, feeling of pointlessness to it.
KFG
Why don't they use this opportunity to create a large searchable database of every species while they are at it.
They could include information such as name, ncientific name (the latin? stuff), physical Description, a few photographs of male and female specimins, eating preferences, defense mechanisms, known locations of presence, and other various notes.
When it comes to the carnavores, you could make entries in their diet link to the victims' records.
Then just make it searchable. Filterable by geographical area, species, keywords, etc. Very powerful. Then all you need is to make it publically available. Read-only of course.
Lord May said: "At that rate it's going to take us about 500 years just to complete the catalogue, leaving aside the fact that extinctions might help us by wiping a lot of them out, which is hardly a cheerful solution."
i think the point is to try to find as many as possible before it's too late, and the only goal you can set to do that is the impossible one.
Hmmmm I suppose one of the major problems in this undertaking to attempting to solve "grey areas", IE what is a different species and what it not.
A case in point is the Vancouver Island Marmot. This highly endangered animal is concidered a seperate species than the regular rocky mountain marmot. Even though the only major difference between the two is that the Vancouver island marmot has a patch on it's nose.
Compare this to the difference in animals of the same species. A dalmation and a bulldog are concidered to be the same species of animal, even though they are vastly different in apperence and behavior.
There are just examples of the thousands of grey areas the exist between species. So one must ask, how specific are they getting, what in these scientists eyes is a seperate species and what is simply a different race.
By setting the standard for what is a species high, the task of discovering every species becomes much easier than if the bar was set lower.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
The various surname projects could be sold the right to name a species after their family as a kind of tribal totem. The ecological range of every species occupying a given area could then contribute to the purchase of that land area and stock holdings by various surname groups could control the land area. Areas with naturally higher biodiversity would have a lot more surname sales and therefore more tribal totems resident. This would be a good way to get people to identify their familial bloodlines with various species that would statistically favor preservation of high-biodiversity areas.
At the time few of the surname projects that now exist on the internet were had come into existence. I think there is a lot more support for this sort of genealogical identity these days and totems may be a real commodity to sell in preservation of biodiversity.
Seastead this.
Well, over the coarse of 25 years, perhaps a couple of new species will evolve but as long as they pop up slower than we can count them, should be ok.
I think the problem is all of the tiny ecosystems all over the world. There are species of frogs that have only been found in a certain cave, etc. How many of those systems lie in places like the bottom of the ocean? Does anyone think we will have the bottom of the ocean explored to the kind of detail needed to search for worms in the next 25 years?
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
how do you classify the differences between asexual species?
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat.
Ah, quite the contrary. It's my (imperfect) understanding that the rate of speciation goes up when resources are limited, and goes down during times of plenty.
The theory is that differences in individuals aren't sufficient to lead to speciation until they become survival traits. In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful. But in a more constrained environment, different traits become survival factors, and individuals with specific survival traits will tend to interbreed, leading eventually to speciation.
To use a really simple example, imagine a grassland populated by browsing mammals. The population is stable, the food and water sources are plentiful, the predation is low. Now kill off all the grass. Most of the browsing mammals will die off immediately. Some of them will have the (probably recessive) trait of being able to eat something other than grass; tree bark, maybe. Those individuals will survive and interbreed. Another group of the browsers will have the recessive trait of being able to eat dead browser. Those will survive-- thrive, even, given all the handy dead browserbeast carcasses lying around-- and interbreed. Eventually the two varieties of ex-browsers will drift far enough apart that they can no longer breed to produce fertile offspring. They'll become different species.
That's the theory, anyway.
I write in my journal
Single cell analysis is fairly routine. You isolate a single cell, culture it, and analyze the colony.
But doing what you thought I was talking about is still not impossible -- amplifying the DNA of a single cell using the polymerase chain reaction, and fingerprinting what you get.
As for cheap DNA fingerprinting, we're close already. You may be thinking of a complete sequencer, where every base is accounted for. But a fingerprinter is just some enzymes to cut up the DNA in the right places, and some electrophoresis to separate the resulting fragments by molecular weight. This can be automated inexpensively if there is a big enough market for it. The forensic process has to be good enough to hold up in court. The species finder does not, as the results will have to be reproduced anyway, and a good hit on a new species would be enough to send the sample to a lab with better equipment.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
It doesn't work because there are known counterexamples.Orchids come to mind first off. Almost any orchid you can purchase at a greenhouse is a hybrid. They even produce fertile offspring with crosses from different genera.
Here is a list of genera, including what they call them when they are intergenus crosses (and just for the letter "A"). If you take the genus "Allenara", it is a hybrid of the naturally occuring genera Cattleya, Diacrium, Epidendrum, and Laelia. You get a cross of four genera by making two hybrids (say Cattleya x Diacrium and Epidendrum x Laelia) and then crossing the two hybrids.
Maybe that definition will work for most things, but it's a mystery to me how they decide that this orchid is a different (or the same) species from that one, much less that they should be in different genera.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Seems that with our current rate of extinction it should be pretty easy. Hell, there may be no work to do; maybe all the ones tha we don't know about will be dead in 25 years anyway.
MDC
Do you have ESP?
Scientists are still finding new species of ants frequently. The last number was 11,006 according to Antbase.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Add to that the fact that biological ecosystems are dynamic systems where "species" appear and disappear, usually without human intervention, mind you, as part of its natural existence and process. This makes the idea of creating a encyclopedic master reference of species even more dubious because it is an already vague and definitely moving target.
It would be nice to track species if a definition could actually be defined in terms of something repeatably measureable (probably in terms of genotypic distances or something) to understand the dynamic systems they are part of, but such a project will probably be used for more cynical purposes.
JGski