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When I hear numbers like this, I always wonder "out of how many"? So I looked it up: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there https://ourworldinda
by BurningFrog 3y ago
When I hear numbers like this, I always wonder "out of how many"?
So I looked it up: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there
TLDR: Somewhere between 2.1 and 8.7 million.
- burkaman 3y agoThat is a lot lower than I would have guessed (only 300,000 plant species on the entire planet?). I think the number of known species, 2.16 million, is the better comparison here, because we're talking about known extinctions. Also, this is just extinctions in the US, but I can't find a good number of known species that exist in the US. For one example, 10 of the 21 species labeled as extinct here are birds, and there seem to be roughly 900 species of birds in the United States. So 10 seems like a lot. There are also 8 extinct mussel species out of 297 known in North America.
- BurningFrog 3y agoPart of what makes this hard is that "species" isn't a clearly defined concept. So, depending on which definition you use, you can get very different numbers.
- resolutebat 3y agoNearly 2M of those are insects, plants or fungi, and none of these made it into the list of 21 here. There are under 100k distinct "animals" in the sense we usually think of the word (mammals, reptiles, birds).