Number of new species described....
Ellinor Michel
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 18:37 UTC
I was surprised to see the introduction to this forum state that there are only 2000 new species described each year. Could this be short by an order of magnitude? In zoology alone we have recently been using the estimate of 16,000–24,000 nomenclatural acts yearly. My sources are derived from data and comments by Nigel Robinson, who runs Zoological Record, Philippe Bouchet, who has catalogued this for marine molluscs and extrapolated to other taxa, and Sandro Minelli, who has been on the forefront of nomenclature for many decades. In fact, some data indicates even more – up to 30,000 zoological nomenclatural acts/year has been suggested. Of course, ‘nomenclatural acts’ includes more than simply new species descriptions (with the exciting additions of new genera, new families, lectotypifications, neotypfications, emendations and actions by first revisers, but in zoology does not include formation of novel combinations, which is included in botany). Where does the ‘2000 new species/year’ number come from? Can anyone steer us to robust estimates of the total new species yearly in biology? The Institute for Species Exploration reports 16,969 new species (excluding microbes) in 2006 in the SOS-State of Observed Species (http://species.asu.edu/SOS). This number seems well supported, with specifics on sources.
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Replies
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Ellinor, I’m happy to accept the much higher figures you quote (I’m not sure where the value of 2000 came from). In an ideal world there would be a service which told us how many new names have been published (and listed the new names). There are some services which go part way towards this (such as Index of Organism Names, which seems to be rather infrequently updated, and uBio RSS), but it still beggars belief that we can’t easily provide actual lists of new names, never mind a list of all species that have been described.
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Indeed. Something like NamesBank….perhaps we can think of a catchy moniker for the zoology part….give me, oh, 3 months?
But seriously, we are aiming for release of ZooBank at the eBiosphere meeting in June. It is currently in development, with names from ZooTaxa, ZooKeys and a few other sources being entered by a few cogniscenti. While this can not be complete even for new names until the community agrees that registration should be mandatory, we are at least moving towards having the mechanism in place to provide a real name bank. This will be a major step forward in integrating nomenclature across biology, not only in zoology. I should let those who are working at the coalface, like Rich Pyle, Dave Remsen, Paul Kirk and the other nomenclatural big boys, give an up-to-date overview of the project.
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Ellinor, apologies for the typo, and thanks for noticing this – I meant to write 20,000 – but I should add that I have only heard this estimate quoted anecdotally in presentations. (N.B. I think this estimate is for eukaryotes only – it’s too much of a minefield to enter into this with prokaryotes as it’s hard to get out of the ‘definition of a species’ debate).
However, I’ve just been having a rummage around the literature and can’t find any authoritative figures for this, except for the ASU-IISE figure of 16,969 new species described in 2006. There is an interesting paper: Predicting unknown species numbers using discovery curves (Bebber et al., 2007, Proc. R. Soc. B, 274:1651-1658) which looks at rates of species discovery in various groups, but not all organisms together.
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