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An interesting research note just came out in the American Naturalist by Hamilton and colleagues entitled Quantifying uncertainty in estimation of tropical arthropod species richness. I retweeted a Science Daily twitter feed on this that had a terribly misleading opening line: “New calculations reveal that the number of species on Earth is likely to be in the order of several million rather than tens of millions“. This is, of course, absolute rubbish because the authors only looked at estimating tropical arthropod richness, not all species on Earth. The number of protists alone is probably > 4 million species, and there are an estimated > 1.5 fungi.
That whinge about crap reporting aside, this is what Hamilton and colleagues concluded:
- using stochastic models, they predict medians of 3.7 million and 2.5 million tropical arthropod species globally
- estimates of 30 million species or greater are predicted to have < 0.00001 probability
- uncertainty in the proportion of canopy arthropod species that are beetles is the most influential parameter
- in spite of 250 years of taxonomy and around 855000 species of arthropods already described, approximately 70 % await description
Interesting, but I didn’t give it much notice until New Scientist contacted me to get an assessment (their article will appear shortly). This is what I had to say: Read the rest of this entry »
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