Less than 15% species cataloged till now: Research
Submitted by Sam Ross on August 25, 2011 - 4:17pm
The study said that Earth is a home to about 8.7 million species and we are no way near to find all the species. If the study is correct, then some of the organisms may vanish even before they will be recorded.
Co-author of the study, Boris Worm of Canada's Dalhousie University said, “Are we within reach of finding all species, or are we way off? The answer is we are way off.”
The study says that the classifications of some living beings are almost over which includes mammals and birds. But, some classes of living being are sadly classified very less. Only 7% of the fungi have been found so far which includes mushrooms and yeasts. In the oceans only 10% of the life form has been identified by the scientists till now.
Worm said, “Those things that are easy to find, that are conspicuous, that are relatively large. There is an age of discovery ahead of us when we could find out so much more of what lives with us on this planet.”
To know how many species of living beings are present on Earth, the researchers examined the categories of the species in which they are grouped. Scientists put the species into a broader group called genus and genes were further categorized into family and then to the super-category called kingdom. The scientists after that used complex statistics to predict and calculate the living species on the Earth which they found to be around 8.7 million.
Supporters and non supports of the study
Some researchers have supported this study and have called it reasonable. Lucas Joppa, a conservation ecologist at Microsoft Research, said, “That the new study takes a hugely clever approach, and I think it's going to turn out to be a pretty important study. If I asked you to count out 8.7 million pennies that would take you a while, even if you had a whole lot of people doing it.”
However, everyone is not in the favour of this study. An ecologist at the environmental group Earthwatch Institute, Dan Bebber said that the method which was used by the researchers was wrong. He said that the researchers could have used the technique called ordinal regression and because of that the result could have been different.
