Riley Hadlock Biology 1615 Evelyn Galvez

Title: How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? Introduction: If aliens visited our planet, one of the questions they would probably ask is, How many distinct life forms-species-does your planet have? This was one point that Robert May recently noted. The answer to that question is one that is quite embarrassing because we would not be able to answer that with confidence. The article discusses the limited research that has been thus far. The best estimation of species, bases on the opinion of taxonomic experts, is between 3 and 100 million species. Many of the approaches to the assumptions may sometimes lead to heated controversy. The predictions cover groups such as, insects, deep-sea invertebrates, large organisms, animals, fungi, and plants. Materials and methods: The databases that were used were; for the number of species it was based off the most current Catalogue of Life. For the estimation of species in the ocean it was based off of The Worlds Registry of Marine Species. To account for the higher taxa they ranked each taxa from phylum to genus into six asymptotic parametric regression models. They used multi model averaging based on small sample sizes to be able to predict the asymptotic number of taxa. To estimate the number of species in one of the taxa groups from the higher taxa they used the Least Squares Regression models. They also used the model based on Generalized Least Squares to find the independent hierarchically organized taxa; both of these models were used to run with and without the

inverse of the consensus. They evaluated the fit of exponential, power, and hyper exponential functions of the data. They got a prediction of the number of species. They contacted 4,771 taxonomy experts to see if they would respond to a survey, 548 of the experts contacted responded with information to the different questions asked. Discussion: Although the number of species is unknown they are determined to find out how many species there are. There are many incomplete samples and are very uncertain and even some controversial estimates. Their estimate of species is ~8.7 million. Some studies are biases to large geographical ranges, body sizes, and abundances. In order to find out an estimate of species they will need to have a renewed interest in exploration and taxonomy. Results: From the ~1.2 million valid species they have found that the eukaryote kingdoms, the higher taxa are more complete than the lower taxa. In prokaryotes there isn't much of an asymptote at the taxonomic level. They used a formal multi modelaveraging framework to predict the asymptotic number of taxa. They tried the approach on 18 taxonomic groups. When they tried it on the eukaryote kingdoms they predicted ~7.77 million species of animals, ~298,000 species of plants, ~611,000 species of fungi, ~36,400 species of protozoa, and ~27,500 species of chromists; all which adds up to ~8.74 species in total. For the prokaryotes they predicted that there are ~10,100 lower bound species and ~1,320 are marine. Possible Limitations: There are a number of limitations that could influence the results of the study. Some of the limitations they describe are, the species definitions, changes in higher taxonomy, assessment of factors affecting the higher taxon approach, changes in taxonomic effort, and completeness of taxonomic inventories. Each of these limitations is

important to keep in mind to help not to alter the results of the experiment. Although these are not all of the limitations these are the ones that they believe are most important and the ones that can change the information the most. Bibliography:http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourn al.pbio.1001127