How Many Species?

How many organisms live on this little planet of ours? A pretty straight-forward question. The answer, however, is much more enigmatic. Estimates range from a careful 3 million to a huge 100 million. Now, a new approach, published in PLoS Biology, has yielded another estimate. The new method used resulted in an estimate of 8.7 million (± 1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species, of which 2.2 million (± 0.18 million SE) can be found in the oceans. As about 1.2 million species are catalogued, this would mean that roughly 86% of organisms on earth still await discovery, a number that rises to 91% in the oceans.Where do these numbers come from? read more

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