4 ms·

Who has counted the remaining 86%?

by hcack 15y ago

BasDirks 15y ago
"Worm's team estimated the total number of genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla—a designation above class—in each kingdom. That's a relatively easy task, since the number of new examples in these categories has leveled off in recent decades. By contrast, the number of newly discovered species continues to rise sharply. Using complex statistics, Worm and colleagues used the number of genera, families, and so on to predict Earth's number of unknown species, and their calculations gave them a number: 8.7 million."
angdis 15y ago
There are also techniques from "metagenomics" where environmental samples are taken from ocean water captured in filters and dna-sequenced en-masse (see "Global Ocean Sampling"). It is then possible to statistically infer the number of distinct species by analyzing the sequence data. This was first attempted in the Sargasso Sea which had been thought to be relatively sparse in microbial diversity. Instead, it was found to have a shocking number of entirely new microbial species. The scary thing is not simply that species are going extinct, but that species which we may never know of may go extinct in the near future.
- swah 15y ago
  I'm trying to grasp what you mean by scary in this context.
  - BasDirks 15y ago
    We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it.
    - anamax 15y ago
      > We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it. That's not my interpretation. In any event, species have been going extinct for almost as long as there have been species. It's unclear that we've appreciably changed the extinction. And, while one may be scared by species extinction, it's how things work. (I'm scared of height, but that doesn't imply that someone should do something about height.) BTW - we've probably preserved and enabled species, especially at the low-end, that would have otherwise gone extinct or never come into being.
    - swah 15y ago
      I was just thinking in the line of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". Why should we feel bad if a species comes and goes without we ever knowing about it? Isn't that expected and natural? Doesn't that happen all the time in the universe?
      - angdis 15y ago
        Sure, it happens all the time and has happened since before humans existed. The concern is about how much extinction humans are CAUSING. Given that extinctions can impact entire ecosystems, we (as a species) should be worried about the impact we're having on other species, if only for our own selfish reasons. The fact that there are species that we don't even know about means there is still a lot to learn about life on Earth. It is generally a bad idea to aggressively mess around with a system that is not well-understood, that is what we're doing and this news items demonstrates how little we actually know about our ecosystem.
        ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
        For our own selfish reasons, we should get better at designing and building ecosystems, instead of expending resources on discovering, categorizing, and protecting unknown species. The former gives us a better future, whereas the latter produces mostly a constant state of guilt about not doing enough. For example, I am appalled at how we still farm outdoors, where we have little control over pests and weather, especially given that our main methods of pest control tend to hurt us, such as through chemicals or through Monsanto-style genetic modification and patenting. We could begin to move in a completely new direction, and that is to create something like the Ultima Tower, as envisioned by Eugene Tsui. It's clear that if we don't take grand steps towards engineering a sustainable future, we won't be able to survive a variety of calamities to which we are now exposed, and in that grand scheme, untold numbers of species dying, whether at our hands or due to our carelessness, is irrelevant. http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui

Who has counted the remaining 86%?

by hcack 15y ago

Who has counted the remaining 86%?

"Worm's team estimated the total number of genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla—a designation above class—in each kingdom. That's a relatively easy task, since the number of new examples in these categories has leveled off in recent decades. By contrast, the number of newly discovered species continues to rise sharply. Using complex statistics, Worm and colleagues used the number of genera, families, and so on to predict Earth's number of unknown species, and their calculations gave them a number: 8.7 million."

angdis 15y ago

There are also techniques from "metagenomics" where environmental samples are taken from ocean water captured in filters and dna-sequenced en-masse (see "Global Ocean Sampling"). It is then possible to statistically infer the number of distinct species by analyzing the sequence data. This was first attempted in the Sargasso Sea which had been thought to be relatively sparse in microbial diversity. Instead, it was found to have a shocking number of entirely new microbial species. The scary thing is not simply that species are going extinct, but that species which we may never know of may go extinct in the near future.

swah 15y ago
I'm trying to grasp what you mean by scary in this context.
- BasDirks 15y ago
  We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it.
  - anamax 15y ago
    > We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it. That's not my interpretation. In any event, species have been going extinct for almost as long as there have been species. It's unclear that we've appreciably changed the extinction. And, while one may be scared by species extinction, it's how things work. (I'm scared of height, but that doesn't imply that someone should do something about height.) BTW - we've probably preserved and enabled species, especially at the low-end, that would have otherwise gone extinct or never come into being.
  - swah 15y ago
    I was just thinking in the line of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". Why should we feel bad if a species comes and goes without we ever knowing about it? Isn't that expected and natural? Doesn't that happen all the time in the universe?
    - angdis 15y ago
      Sure, it happens all the time and has happened since before humans existed. The concern is about how much extinction humans are CAUSING. Given that extinctions can impact entire ecosystems, we (as a species) should be worried about the impact we're having on other species, if only for our own selfish reasons. The fact that there are species that we don't even know about means there is still a lot to learn about life on Earth. It is generally a bad idea to aggressively mess around with a system that is not well-understood, that is what we're doing and this news items demonstrates how little we actually know about our ecosystem.
      - ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
        For our own selfish reasons, we should get better at designing and building ecosystems, instead of expending resources on discovering, categorizing, and protecting unknown species. The former gives us a better future, whereas the latter produces mostly a constant state of guilt about not doing enough. For example, I am appalled at how we still farm outdoors, where we have little control over pests and weather, especially given that our main methods of pest control tend to hurt us, such as through chemicals or through Monsanto-style genetic modification and patenting. We could begin to move in a completely new direction, and that is to create something like the Ultima Tower, as envisioned by Eugene Tsui. It's clear that if we don't take grand steps towards engineering a sustainable future, we won't be able to survive a variety of calamities to which we are now exposed, and in that grand scheme, untold numbers of species dying, whether at our hands or due to our carelessness, is irrelevant. http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui