(Image source: ZME Science)
BY TRACY PFEIFFER
ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
You're watching multisource science news analysis from Newsy.
Mankind has catalogued about 1.2 million species on Earth-- and a new study suggests, that’s just the beginning.
WCCO has the story-- and a good time with one of the latest additions.
“A new study estimates that there are close to 9 million different species on Earth.”
“And according to scientists, we’ve only discovered about 25 percent of them. And here are few that have recently said ‘hello.’ Take a look at these little sea creatures. Now this a relative of the squat lobster you’re looking at here. This creature is apparently blind.”
Previous estimates put the number anywhere between 3 million-- and 100 million.
But this study-- used a new method. Nature News explains...
“...[the] method is based on an analysis of the taxonomic classification for all...species currently catalogued. [The] system forms a pyramid-like hierarchy - the lower the category, the more entities it contains. ...a consistent numerical trend links the numbers in each category, and ... this can be used to predict how many entities there should be in poorly catalogued levels...”
TG Daily reports-- the authors of the study estimate that using quote- “traditional approaches” to describe the rest of the planet’s species-- could take 1200 years, 300,000 researchers, and $364 billion. (Video: WXYZ)
So why care?
Former chief scientific advisor Lord May tells the BBC -- humans shouldn’t discount how much they rely on other organisms to survive.
LORD MAY: “As human numbers increase and the impact per person increases, we really need to know more about how we can maintain the ecological services that aren’t costed in conventional GDP, but upon which so much depends … We need to know how much we can lose of that … and we can’t do that properly if we don’t even know what’s there.”
Finally, a writer for ZME Science adds context to the urgency, reporting-- Earth is currently undergoing a rate of extinction unseen-- since the dinosaurs.
“It is currently estimated that each year, some 30,000 species become extinct. Just so you can get an idea, this amounts to three per hour. If you’re still not impressed, this extinction rate is similar to that that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 millon years ago! But this time there’s no [meteorite], just mankind.”
A little asterisk for the study-- it deals only with eukaryotic organisms. It doesn’t deal with, for example-- bacteria.
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