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Interesting that Hindu scriptures (the Bhagavat Puran specifically) mentioned 84 lakh (8.4 million) species. An eerily accurate estimate!

• dalke 11y ago
  That's 8.7M eukaryotic species. There are many more prokaryotic species, though the concept of "species" becomes quite difficult. For this to be 'eerie' rather than a coincidence, there should be some explanation of why prokaryotes shouldn't be included in the count, and what 'species' means.
  • nonbel 11y ago
    Interesting, originally they only counted as one species and there is still controversy to this day about the issue: "Initially, prokaryotes were treated as only a single species which could develop a great variety of shapes (pleomorphism)." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1574-6976.2001.tb00571.x/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1574-6976.2001.... I wonder if they will get plutoed eventually.
    • dalke 11y ago
      I read (er, skimmed) that article too, while trying to get an idea of just how many prokaryotics species there were. :) I quickly realized I was way out of my depth, but given the 5,000 described species and the "hitherto classified prokaryotic species account for a very small portion of the real prokaryote diversity", I figured it as safe to assume there were a lot more. > I wonder if they will get plutoed eventually. ... No? Though I'm not sure what 'plutoed' means, with 5,000 described species, making up both the Archaea and Bacteria domains (the third domain is Eukaryota), it's hard to imagine any sort of demotion or additional reclassificaton.
      • nonbel 11y ago
        I was thinking that if no agreement can be made and the number of species keeps rising, the prokaryotes would get split into one or a few species and the current species would become sub-species (or some other appropriate label). This would be similar to how astronomers kept finding objects like pluto they didn't want to call planets. By the way, my spell check doesn't even recognize the word prokaryote (although it does have eukaryote).
        • dalke 11y ago
          The prokaryotes are already split into two domains, so there's no way they will be called subspecies of a single species. Note that all the millions of eukaryotes fit into one domain. The domain is a much higher level than species. It's Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_taxonomy . Thus, it's hugely more likely that the intermediate classification terms will be used, rather than group everything a subspecies of a small number of species. Even if there are billions of prokaryotic species.
    • dnautics 11y ago
      There is a huge difference between a streptomyces and a shigella, but a huger still difference between either and an archaeon like pyrococcus
      • nonbel 11y ago
        But if the number of different species in that category is in the billions, it may be necessary to use a different classification scheme: "This number is very difficult to assess, but the discussed range varies from tens of thousands to billions;[48][49][50][51] most recent approaches and studies appear to favor the larger magnitude number" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species
  • osrec 11y ago
    Agree; there are probably a variety of rather loose definitions being thrown around in any discussion on this topic.