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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."
after we've killed off a bunch of them.
I count 0, 1, 10, 11...
Each more delicious than the last!
Hmm... maybe I should have had breakfast this morning...
crazy dynamite monkey
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."
I count 0, 1, 11, 10, 110, 111...
My gears don't wear out as fast as yours.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Actually, being tasty to humans is one of the most advantageous adaptations a species can have. Well, either the best or the worst, depending on if we raise them or unsustainably collect them from the wild until the population collapses. You don't see cows or chickens or apples or oranges in any danger any time soon, but then again, things have been eaten to extinction. I don't think it's too bad of an idea to, where possible, try to introduce cultivated or farmed endangered species into the food supply. Preservation through consumption.
The notion of interbreeding as the sole definition of species is simply wrong. Even where fertile hybrids are produced, as with brown bears and polar bears, it's still not enough to warrant declaring them the same species. There are a number of factors that go into determining when two populations are members of the same species or not, and producing fertile and fit offspring is only one of them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3...
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Well... "Two organisms that cannot produce fertile offspring are separate species" would probably be more accurate. Otherwise you would be lumping tigers and lions into the same species. And the reverse is not true, just because two species can produce fertile offspring doesn't mean they are the same species. For example, polar bears are able to breed with brown bears, false killer whales can create fertile offspring with bottle nosed dolphins; not to mention the countless plant hybrids that are possible.
Please turn in your geek badge at the door. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code
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)
Good thing he has 11 of them!
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
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 :(
Ya got me there. Never heard of gray code, but I see what it is now; its used for karnaugh map numbering and all. My professor always said we numbered that way to allow for easier identification if implicants, but never told us it had a name.
I stand corrected
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Mules most certainly can mate, and occasionally the female versions get pregnant and have foals. The usual fertility issues with horse/donkey mules are because they have an odd number of genes (63) rather than 62 (donkeys) or 64 (horses) which results in difficulties pairing up genetic material. At least that's what Wikipedia tells me. Would Jamie Wailes lie to me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
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..."
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.
They did not "remove a whole group". The previous estimates of 30 to 100 million species also did not include bacteria.
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There are 10 kinds of people: Those who understand Gray code, those who don't, and those who mistake it for binary.
The only definition of a species is that two organisms that cannot mate are, by definition, different species.
To illustrate the subtleties in the actual definition(s) used by biologists, a prof in a class I was in wrote a definition very much like the above, and asked the class "What's wrong with this definition?" He was impressed when I spoke up and said "According to that definition, you and I are not the same species." We were (and probably still are ;-) both male, so he just grinned and said "Ya got it." Funny thing was that a good percentage of the class still had a puzzled looks on their faces, so he had to explain to them what I'd just said.
He later mentioned that there are other important problems with such definitions. One is that people generally want "the same X as" to be a transitive relation. But Ma Nature throws monkey wrenches into such things. Thus, the domestic dog Canis familiaris can interbreed with wild wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals can't interbreed (or rather, they can, but the few offspring are sterile). So dogs are the same species as wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals are different species. There are many examples like this.
A more subtle sort of example is what are sometimes called "range species", in which matings of critters not too far apart are fertile, but when the distance gets above some threshold, fertile hybrids are no longer possible. This happens in a lot of shoreline species.
We've had a couple of centuries to work out such ideas, and biologists have been fairly successful at dealing with this fairly important concept. But you need more carefully worded definitions than the above.
If you want to read about an especially difficult "species" distinction, google for the results of mating lions with tigers. That should convince anyone how tricky it is to get the definition right.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I would like to participate in the study to find out. I will graciously accept the burden of attempting to mate with a supermodel and see if we can produce offspring.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
We're like mules, same species, just practically incapable of reproduction.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
OP is right, in that there are lots of different definitions of "species" and none of them is unambiguous. "Can mate" doesn't seem to be used much amongst taxonomists, not just because of bacteria but also because of things like ring species.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Um, so you're saying that because it is invertible in a structure's multiplicative monoid, that it is not a prime? That doesn't follow. The reason we mathematicians decided to make 1 a special case among primes, and say it isn't one, is to make the expressing the prime number theorem easy, in terms of unique factorizations, instead of unique factorizations modulo factorizations including 1.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I count 1,2,4,5... for there is the number I never mention except to explode the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
*Touché
:x
It's one possible solution to the problem of classifying Ring Species. For the simplest case, where populations (A+B) could be classified as a species, and populations (B+C) could as well, but (A+C) could not, how many species do you have? I could make strong arguments for one, two, two-point-five, and three.
It gets even trickier with longer rings/chains. If (A+B), (B+C), and (C+D) all meet a definition of "species", but (A+D) doesn't (requirement of "ring species"), that still leaves open questions about (A+C) and (B+D). One possible solution is to use larger or smaller fractions depending on the answers to those pairings.
Of course, there's also the issue of defining "species"--what Wikipedia calls the "Species Problem". Note that I was careful to say above, "could be classified as a species", or "meet a definition of species". The common definition, "able to produce fertile offspring" is almost meaningless to microbiologists (where sex--genetic sharing--is separate from reproduction) and unanswerable by paleontologists, since extinct species rarely reproduce.
As Dawkins argues, the whole concepts of species and families and kingdoms seems to stem from an attempt to inflict Platonic idealism on a messy and ambiguous reality. Life is chaotic. Should we be surprised if it turns out to have a fractal nature and fractional dimension? :)