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New Estimate Suggests 5.5M Species On Earth, Not 30-100M
An anonymous reader writes "How many species share our planet? According to a recalculation by an international research team, the number is significantly lower than we thought — only around 5.5 million."
1, 2, 3.... how do you count?
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
I know for a fact that this is wrong, because every single beetle with a slightly different coloration OBVIOUSLY counts as a new species. Who needs to check for mating incompatibility?
We have a lot less work ahead of us that originally anticipated. Only 5.499999 million to go!
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
after we've killed off a bunch of them.
5.5 MILLION tasty species.
5500000^H^H^H^H^H^H^H5499999^H^H^H^H^H^H^H5499998^H^H^H^H^H^H^H5499997...
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Each more delicious than the last!
Hmm... maybe I should have had breakfast this morning...
crazy dynamite monkey
the Nanites and the self-aware computers finally hit their stride.
London, England. Today BP Chairman Johan Georing declared responsibilty for the recently discovered mass extinction of species on Planet Earth. "With 10 to 15 million down," Georing said, "we only have four or five million more to go. And just look how well we seem to be doing this month."
So they say there are 5.5 million species on earth and the World Resources Institute Says 100 species are going extinct every day!
So, by 2160 every species on earth will be extinct. Sounds good to me, lets eat!
It is obviously another propaganda attempt by the biodiversity denialists who are funded by the Big Zoo industry.
FTA:
By looking at all of the beetles that live on a single tree species in Papua New Guinea, the researchers were able to extrapolate their numbers to a global scale.
No, they thought they could extrapolate their numbers to a global scale. Luckily, they used only the most rigourous methods...
This type of model is widely used in financial risk assessments, but has rarely been applied to ecology.
Well perhaps not the most rigourous, more likely that type of model has never been applied to reality, but I digress. This smells like bullshit science and shouldn't be leant much credibility.
...despite what you were told in school, the definition of "species" has become considerably fuzzier than "can mate". It is not a cut-and-dried designation at all anymore, which obviously complicates counting the total number of species on the planet.
This source includes discussion on what counts as a species.
Which obviously could not be the case. This is the same sort of erroneous statistics that lead to creationist "proofs" that the world is only 4,000/6,000/10,000 years old by assuming that the current human population growth rate is exactly the same as it has been throughout history and counting backwards.
And i am terribly sorry for those several million caught in the blast wave.
Yours sincerely,
Human Race
Well that will make the "Kill one of every animal species" trophy much easier to acquire.
Wow... The headline is more informative than the summary. And it's not even misleading (only the actual story is)! *thumbs up @ slashdot*
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
in the submitted blurb that it's because they didn't include bacteria in this study.
Yes, they removed a whole group and then the number was less..I'm shocked it tell you, Shocked!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, that's not too bad of a premise. The sad part is, is farming many types of foods is prohibitively expensive. And some just don't/won't grow in a non-natural environment. It would be nice to have more awareness of different foods, and farm ability. I personally think that a lot of farmed foods simply aren't as tasty as their wild cousins. Then again, sometimes it's just what you want.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
at that point... to zero.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
But what definition of species does this estimate use? It may seem odd, but there really isn't a scientific consensus of how to define a "species". That's not to say there aren't strong opinions out there, but it tends to vary from field to field depending on what questions a particular group of biologists is trying to answer. When you actually dig down and look carefully, there are shades of gray and blurring of lines all over the place (as would be expected for a world that is constantly evolving - there's no clear day on which one species becomes two).
(If you're trying to count species from the point of view of a billionaire with a Pokemon mindset, you're going to be disappointed because there will never have a perfect checklist for you to collect)
Isn't it a little assuming to count things we haven't found yet? I don't see anything about whether this is known species or just an arbitrary made up number of what scientists haven't seen yet. Might as well add God and the Loch Ness Monster to the list.
The real question is how many of those species are delicious?
Let me see if I understand their methods. If we take some sort of statistical sample with trees common to the deserts in Africa (let's say two Beatles named Ringo and Paul live in all of them), we can also determine the number of species on Earth? What happens if we pick a tree species where no Beatles or any species lives? Hell, what if we start with a desert with no trees or life at all? How about the poles? How many Beatles live in them apple trees?
The statistical likelihood of BS seems very high.
Living in Chile
Only 3 more species and I'll have tasted them all!!!
The study doesn't take into account bacteria, archaea nor unicellular eukaryotes. That's where by far most of biodiversity (species count and number of genes and metabolic pathways) and biomass (carbon and nutrients) lie. Typical macroworld arrogance :(
Some alternate headlines:
New estimate suggests 5.5M species on Earth, not 5.4M
New estimate suggests 5.5M species on Earth, not 5-10
New estimate suggests 5.5M species on Earth, not 1M (also not 1.1M, nor 1.2M, nor 1.3M)
I mean really, all that changed here was our estimate. The number of species didn't suddenly change; this revision of estimate didn't suddenly eliminate 24M+ species.
I'm not saying the researchers didn't do their homework, but for something of this gravity, I would have expected Science or Nature to pick it up, not American Naturalist. Not that American Naturalist is a bad journal, but its certainly easier to get a paper in there than other journals (even Ecology, if I'm not mistaken). In light of that, I'm a bit skeptical of their claims.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
I think what we all want to know is how many taste great after a slow smoke with apple wood.
The vast majority of named species is animal with over 1.25 million named, if there isn't as many plant and fungi as animals I would be extremely surprised.
It's largely a matter of convention. Wolves hybridize with coyotes to produce viable offspring ... but the two species are genetically, behaviorally and ecologically distinct (in most places) so it seems reasonable to treat them as different species.
Insect species are often split based on tiny morphological details, even where the two populations hybridize. Other times they are organized into "subspecies", or species within a genus are organized into "subgenera".
What might make more sense is some kind of measure of genetic entropy. That would also count low species diversity, as in cases of species that pass through genetic bottlenecks (e.g. cheetahs), and so which represent a less stable population.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
5.5 dozen more likely. Don't accept too completely what you read in the native literature
How many species share our planet? According to a recalculation by an international research team, the number is significantly lower than we thought - only around 5.5 million...
Cue the science deniers in 3...2...1...
...breathlessly observing that, "Once again, science has proven that it can't be trusted..."
From 100M+ to 5.5M? We sure are killing them off fast...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to discredit the dangers of biodiversity loss, but I have real trouble assigning any real meaning to the notion of "millions of species", and I don't think that those numbers are doing much to win over eco-skeptics either. The real issue to me seems to be overall genetic diversity and the need to preserve it; how many "species" you pigeonhole that diversity into has very little practical relevance and is probably impossible to do properly anyway.
...science is hard when you've been crushing beer cans against your head all day.
We are to blame for the loss of so many species....sure flamebait me if you will, even troll me, but it does not change the fact we are destructive in nature, look at my GF she decided that the racoon in our backyard was not supposed to get in and set a trap...so let's kill mother nature because we were brainwashed to think the land we leased from the government for a certain amount ACTUALLY belongs to us and not mother nature...hate to tell you though that after we are long gone, mother nature will still be here unless we are successful in killing her first...then the point will become moot.
The reason why those calculations are dropping is not because of error, but because of human consumption, and destruction.
I would seriously love to see an alien life form come down on earth and take stuff because they thought they had a right because they are more intelligent then we are, and therefor should be able to walk into our environment and totally bulldoze through our houses because "they bought that land from x government on their home planet stating there was no REAL intelligent life on earth and they could build their home here...."....a bit like Avatar's message, although no one will ever remember that message over the 3d and special effects or cool theme about avatars for humans...etc...
They did not "remove a whole group". The previous estimates of 30 to 100 million species also did not include bacteria.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I just discovered an undocumented new species! The basement-dwelling slashdot geek nerd.
wake up and hold your nose
Is that the number of *known* species? If so, obviously someone should just total them up, no guessing needed.
Of course, since this is about the *actual* species, many of which are apparently either unrecognized, uncataloged, or just plain unknown, then this number is plain made up too.
Woo. I'm impressed. No wonder people don't believe Science. It's too much guessing disguised as knowledge.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/) is aggregating much of the known scientific information about life on earth with a species page for every described species. I believe there is a placeholder for at least 1.4 million species but this will surely grow as new species are discovered and described.
Just yesterday I was calculating some stuff and noticed that when I pressed the 'pi' button on my calculator I got 3.14159 instead of the never-ending irrational number. Same for 'e'. (Well, different numbers, but "not the never-ending irrational" part.)
I'm wondering the same thing myself -- it seems that the only way you can get millions of beetle species is by counting minor differences between them as a different species. Yet as the history of dog breeding shows, two very very different looking organisms can be the same species, capable of mating and everything. I have no doubt that somewhere, two kinds of beetles have been called different species, though they differ as much as a poodle and a great dane, and have never been tested for interbreeding capability.
Heck, I've even heard about this problem for bigger animals, like when a species has subpopulations that geographically separate and then get called two species just because of the different geography: now we have the North Elbonian wumpus and South Elbonian wumpus. Can they interbreed? Who cares anymore, if we can stir up concern about an extinction?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
On the Termination of Species
Enough! Get off!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The computer models are getting better at this, but man what a storm. It is a wonder though to watch a whole branch of the evolutionary tree get torn off its ancient Linean home and regrafted back to the trunk or a different branch entirely.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
...they use the method I mentioned to "prove" to non-Christians that the universe cannot possibly be more than 4,000, 6,000, or 10,000 years old. Many people who get into arguments where this "proof" is used fail to catch the underlying problem (that the population growth rate is not following an exact exponential curve: it would have gone up and down in the past in response to environmental factors, wars, etc.).
The name-counting from the Bible is how they originally arrived at the numbers they can't agree on (which interestingly originally came from a rabbi), but they're willing to throw any spaghetti against the wall they can in attempts to "prove" their existing belief to themselves and to others.
Whenever one species dies out, it leaves behind an ecological niche for some other species to take advantage of. For instance, the rise of mammals is directly tied to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The total number of species in the world is not going to decrease at a constant rate.