World's Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Thought

Meshach writes "A report out of FOX News (I know, I know) says that there are far fewer unique species of plants than previously thought. The report states that only about a third of named species are actually unique. The rest have been 'discovered' multiple times, often by separate scientists."

Comments

Even if true, the conclusion is not justified.

[Jane Q. Public]

The fact that existing discovered and named flora is redundant should not be too surprising. But the number that we have discovered has no bearing whatsoever on the amount or variety of undiscovered flora, at all. So a statement like "World's Plant Live Far Less Diverse Than Thought" is simply irresponsible. The former situation is simply not evidence of the latter. It has long been acknowledged that we have only formally "discovered" and categorized a small fraction of the Earth's actual diversity.

Re:Even if true, the conclusion is not justified.

[dbIII]

I've got a marine example about the extent of undiscovered species but it still applies. At the moment there is a large ongoing survey of marine life in part of Australia's great barrier reef (emphasis added):
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/3095035.htm#transcript

Dr John Hooper (Queensland Museum):"Things like the Echinoderms which we thought were relatively well known, the whole Holothurians alone, we had a visiting French researcher who looked at the collection of about 130 species we've got and he said you've probably got about 30 new species here, but this big one over here, he was referring to something the size of a house brick, is possibly a new genus as well. This is something you'd trip over if it was on a beach."

The podcast is at: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/12/ssw_20101218_1213.mp3

Whats the big deal?

[mrwolf007]

As far as i can tell as a non-american is that Fox News is a pretty lowly news outlet.

However that doesnt automaticly mean the story cant be true.

Just start assuming the opposite. "There are no duplicates within the millions of plants discovered." In a database of that size, with manually made entries for well over a 100 years, highly unlikely.

So, without further knowledge, one can only speculate about the percentage of duplicate entries.

Re:ah faux news

[TheWanderingHermit]

Considering how they ignore science when it's inconvenient to their agenda, like the recent memos on global warming, for example, they've shown they can intentionally distort science as much as they distort politics.

Department of the obvious

[damn_registrars]

This really shouldn't come as much surprise. There are plenty of plants that look dramatically different at different stages of their life; if they were being "discovered" for the first time they could well be called different species. Add to that the differing languages spoken by different botanists when attempting to classify species and the problem grows very quickly.

And for that matter, with molecular biology our notion of "species" is changing as well. Now a species is defined more along the lines of a unique genome (or at least uniquely organized genome) than simply on where and how it grows. Now we realize that - especially in the plant kingdom - there are many pairings of different species of plants that can hybridize and produce viable offspring.

So indeed, the number was due to be corrected at some point. This happens in other sciences, too; a while ago a few species of dinosaurs were recently re-classified as likely being juvenile specimens of other species.

Re:ah faux news

[Attila Dimedici]

No, a news organization can't have a view point and still be a news organization.

So, you are saying that there are no news organizations, and never have been any.