Here are some stunning news. To TreeHugger : ” Scientists have just completed the most accurate tally of the planet’s species yet (though the projection still has a pretty healthy margin of error). The magic number?”
” 8.7 million, according to the study, which was recently published in the journal PLoS Biology. But the amazing thing is, we’ve only actually ‘discovered’ 86% of them – and thousands of them will be extinct before we do. “
Oddly enough, despite oceans are covering over 70 percent of our planet, there are home to less than a third of all species… This can be explained by the huge amounts of insects on land.
Here is an extract from PLoS Biology :
In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description.
Renewed interest in further exploration and taxonomy is required if this significant gap in our knowledge of life on Earth is to be closed.