4 ms·
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 d
by 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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.