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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.
Each more delicious than the last!
Hmm... maybe I should have had breakfast this morning...
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
Please turn in your geek badge at the door. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code
Good thing he has 11 of them!
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.
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.
We're like mules, same species, just practically incapable of reproduction.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel