600 New Species of Fish Discovered

zenobr writes "Some 300 scientists from 53 countries are creating a record of all known marine life, in a project reminiscent of an aquatic Domesday Book. So far more than 15,000 species of fish have been catalogued and 2 to 3 thousand more are expected to be catalogued before the project's end in 2010. Over 500 of the fish catalogued thus far are thought to be new to science. Full story on BBC News"

Comments

extinct fish?

[KanshuShintai]

I wonder how many fish they thought to be extinct they'll find doing this . . .

Re:600 New Species...

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a dude from Hong Kong who's reaction to seeing our local aquarium was, "...had that, tried that, that's good, didn't like it...."

Re:"New" species?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats only half the problem. Most fish change drastically from youth to adulthood. Here in Hawaii and I know in Japan, we call the a young fish one name and an adult another and they don't look anything like each other. I bet at least some of the count of the species is because they couldn't find enough specimens to follow the lifespan of the fish.

Re:Doomsday book?

[Mattwolf7]

Wow that would be the best book ever! The complete Domesday book.

"Farmer John: 10 Cows, 20 Chickens, 1 house, 1 Wife, 6 kids

Farmer Paul: 20 Cows, 15 Chickens, 1 house, 1 Wife, 10 kids..."

Wait a minute...

The 1985 Project
To mark the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book in 1985, a new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled and published in 1986. This included all the information from the original survey plus modern spellings of the place names, maps, and many color photos.

It was produced in a partnership between Acorn, Ltd, Philips and the BBC. The BBC Domesday Project Community Disc or National Disc was published as two laser disc of the Philips? LaserVision-Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format. Acorn launched a version of the BBC Microcomputer capable of reading the disc format.

In 2002, there were great fears that the disc would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer). However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between Leeds University and University of Michigan) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation techniques. (Unfortunately, this data is not yet publicly accessible due to copyright constraints.)

Interestingly, while there are difficulties accessing digital data from 1986, the original Domesday book, now over 900 years old, can still be consulted. This has renewed interest in ensuring long-term access to digital information.

From Wikipedia.org

Predicting the final count

[G4from128k]

It would be interesting to estimate the total number of species of fish based on the trajectory of species counts. The trajectory probably follows some x% of remaining species are discovered on a yearly basis. A bit of linear regression on a transform of the species counts by year and a bit of calculus should provide a reasonable extrapolation.

Of course a simple analytic model would probably not be accurate for a number of reasons. I am sure there are wastersheds that have not been adequately explored that harbor substantive numbers of unknown species (e.g., Burma). There's also the problem of duplicates. Then there are extinctions of both previously discovered and never-to-be discovered species.

I know, I know, there's probably several papers in the academic literature on this and I'm just too lazy to look them up. But its fun to think about.

Re:It's amazing

[Artifakt]

Worldwide, in the last few years, I have seen several estimations on how many species wait to be discovered, prepared by various organizations of Taxonomists, Biologists, and such. These are always much larger than the general public expects. There are probably no more than a few large mammals, at very most, awaiting discovery, but there may be 100,000 species of insects not yet categorized, and there are probably a thousand types of birds, hundreds of frogs and thousands of amphibians and reptiles, and possibly as many as a dozen rodents. It's even been proposed that there are still over 50 large (not bacteria sized) parasites on humans that have never been entered into a textbook. Overall, we may know as little as 15% of all species, and it appears dead certain the best possible number is less than 1/2. I'm not going to document all this in detail, but sites such as www.bottomquark.com have a few archived articles for those wanting to check the deplorable situation in taxonomy out.

Re:Doomsday book? Try Domesday...

[Anonymous Coward]

A note to his assistant William Randolph Hearst once scribbled on a picture of some piece of expensive artwork or real estate:
"Do I own this? If not, buy it."

Re:Not quite true

[Polyploid Pimp]

Actually, you are both right. Depending on whether or not you have a pluralistic view of species or a monistic view. I take a pluralistic view of species concepts. That is, in some cases a biological species concept may apply (the one about the breeding barrier), and in other cases a better species concept may be a genetic similarity/dissimilarity approach may be best. For example, the biological species concept doesn't work too well with too many organisms, especially plants. There are literally hundreds of ways to define a species, from the various phylogenetic species concepts based on synapomorphies or autapomorphies (or other criteria) to ecologically defined species. Don't just assume that there is one species concept - its a fallacy. The world is more complicated than that, and the patterns and mechanisms of evolutionary more diverse than any single concept can accomodate (IMHO).