species at-a-glance How many living species are there? Taxon New Species World (and common name) (2008) 1 Total 2 3 Insecta (insects) 8,794 (48.25%) 1,013,692 Plantae (vascular, including flowering) 2,080 (11.41%) 283,701 Fungi (yeasts, molds, mushrooms, etc.) 1,344 (7.37%) 100,342 Arachnids (spiders, mites, etc.) 1,320 (7.24%) 103,568 Mollusca (snails, slugs, bivalves, etc.) 880 (4.83%) 85,880 Crustacea (crabs, shrimp, krill, etc.) 1,014 (5.56%) 48,014 Fishes 505 (2.77%) 31,658 Protoctista (protists, nucleated algae, etc.) 233 (1.28%) 29,104 Nematoda (round worms) 205 (1.12%) 25,205 Platyhelminthes (flat worms) 225 (1.23%) 20,225 Annelida (segmented worms) 134 (0.74%) 16,897 Algae (Plantae) 32 (0.18%) 12,304 Aves (birds) 7 (0.04%) 9,997 Cnidaria (corals, jellyfish, etc.) 131 (0.72%) 9,926 Reptilia (snakes, lizards, etc.) 129 (0.71%) 8,863 Prokaryotes (bacteria, archaea, etc.) 573 (3.14%) 8,216 Echinodermata (sea urchins, starfish, etc.) 34 (0.19%) 7,037 Amphibia (frogs, salamanders, etc.) 129 (0.71%) 6,644 Porifera (sponges) 57 (0.31%) 6,057 Mammalia (mammals) 41 (0.22%) 5,528 Tunicata (sea squirts, etc.) 48* (0.26%) 2,808 Hemichordata (acorn worms) 2 (0.01%) 110 Other Chordates 0 (0.00%) 149 Other Invertebrates 127 (0.70%) 40,575 Others (e.g. Chromista, Bryophyta) 181 (0.99%) 46,210 TOTALS 18,225 1,922,710 * (sea squirts only) 1 Species officially described as new in calendar year 2008. 2 With the exception of Insecta, the World Total = the sum of the new species from 2008 (2010 SOS) + the world total number of species through 2007 as reported by Chapman, Arthur D., Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World, 2nd Edition , Report for the Australian Bio- logical Resources Study, Sept. 2009, pp 8 - 11, http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/abrs/ publications/other/species-numbers/index.html 3 The world total for insects = 2008 new species + total number of insect species through 2007 as reported by Footit, Robert G., & Adler, Peter H., Insect Biodiversity, Science and Society , Wiley- Blackwell, 2009, p.3. SOS Report 1 State of Observed Species 2010 FAQs Why are 2008 numbers reported? Species are described in thousands of journals, books, and other publications around the globe. We report numbers for the most recent calendar year for which reasonably complete compilations exist. Thus, SOS 2010 summarizes those species officially described and named in 2008. What is a “new species”? New species didn’t just appear. We estimate that Earth is home to more than 10,000,000 plants and animals and perhaps tens of millions of microbes. Scientists add an average of two species per hour or about 18,000 species each year to our inventory of life. Thousands of scientists are searching for new species at field study sites in every ecosystem on our planet and are steadily improving our knowledge of them. Most species remain unknown to sci- ence, inaccessible to those who seek to study, conserve, or use them. The most difficult part of recognizing a species as new to science is learning every species already known in a group. Taxonomists master a body of knowledge that dates from 1753 (for plants) or 1758 (for most animals) in or- der to know a new species when they encounter one. Many new species are discovered in the course of compre- hensive comparative studies of all species of a group. Such studies are known as taxonomic revisions or mono- graphs. Between revisions, hundreds or thousands of specimens may have accumulated in natural history muse- ums or herbaria around the world. Among them will be specimens that refine and improve our understanding of al- ready known species and others representing species new to science. These, combined with specimens newly col- lected in the field, are the raw material for new species. Who are the species explorers? Taxonomy is the science of species exploration. Taxonomists are responsible for discovering, describing, naming, and classifying species. There are so many species on Earth that no one is capable of learning them all. Taxono- mists thus specialize, focusing on the study of particular groups such as plants (botany), insects (entomology), or fishes (ichthyology). What are type specimens? Types are designated from among the original specimens from which new species are named and described. Types are not necessarily typical in any particular anatomical or genetic sense, but rather add stability to the use of scien- tific names. As new evidence is collected and our knowledge of species improves, a previously described species might be divided into more than one species or combined with some other species. Wherever the type specimen falls in regard to the latest theory of species, the name follows. Natural history collections (and type culture collections in the case of many microbes) are the necessary physical evidence of species diversity and the material basis for taxonomy. It is estimated that there are about 3 billion speci- mens in the world’s natural history collections. These make theories about species testable and verifiable. What is “cybertaxonomy”? Taxonomists are currently modernizing their science, adapting information science infrastructure and tools to accel- erate the process of species exploration. Such cyber-enabled taxonomy is called “cybertaxonomy”. This includes both the specialized tools that allow taxonomists to do taxonomy better and faster (such as accessing museum specimens, historical literature, and digital instruments), as well as a new generation of Web accessible resources for users of taxonomic information. Examples of the latter include the Encyclopedia of Life which is creating a Web page for every species ( www.eol.org ); ZooBank that is striving to register new species of animals to make them immediately accessible ( www.zoobank.org ); the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) which is mobilizing data records for billions of specimens in natural history collections around the world ( www.gbif.org ); and the Biodi- versity Heritage Library project which has already scanned more than 29,000,000 pages of historical natural history publications ( www.biodiversitylibrary.org ). SOS Report 2 Species Bites data summaries Mammalia: Of the 213 mammals discovered in 2008, only 41 new species (19.25%) were extant – i.e., currently living. Almost 32% of these new living mammals were rodents and almost all of these were Muridae , the largest Family of living mammals which includes rats, mice and gerbils. Fishes: Across all living Chordata, the 505 new fishes comprised the largest group of species described in 2008 (58.8%). Almost 84% (n = 423) of these new fish species were in the Class Actinopterygii and over half of the new Actinopterygii were in the Order Perciformes (n = 138) or the Order Siluriformes (n = 108). Aves (Birds): Only 32 species of birds were described as new in 2008 and of those, just seven (21.9%) are currently living. These extant species represented the Order Passeriformes (n=6) and Order Procel- lariiformes (n=1) and spanned six Families: Hydrobatidae (Storm-petrels, the smallest seabirds), Sylvii- dae (the Old World or “True” Warblers), Timaliidae (Old World Babblers), Turdidae (Thrushes), Tyranni- dae (Tyrant Flycatchers) and the Zosteropidae (the White-eyes). Amphibia & Reptilia: The newly described amphibians and reptiles in 2008 were tied for extant spe- cies at 129 each. This represented 15% of the new Chordata but less than 1% of the total new extant species reported across the Kingdoms and Phyla. Almost 90% of the extant amphibians were frogs — the Order Anura (n=116) — and over 37% of the total newly described reptiles (n=206) were fossil spe- cies (n = 77 fossils). These reptile fossils included the dinosaur Orders Saurischia (n=15) and Ptero- sauria (n = 7). Dinosaurs: Offering evidence of migration from Asia to the Western Hemisphere, one of the newly de- scribed reptiles in 2008 was Albertonykus borealis — a type of tyrannosaur about the size of a chicken and believed to be the smallest North American dinosaur yet discovered ( Longrich et al, 2008 ). Also newly described in 2008 was the Nemicolopterus crypticus, a “winged lizard” or flying dinosaur from the Pterodactyloidea suborder — more commonly known as the pterodactyls. Insecta: Insects represent the greatest number of animal species on the planet and almost half (48.25%) of all living new species described in 2008 were Insecta. Over 36% of the newly described insects in 2008 were in the Order Coleoptera (beetles) followed by moths & butterflies (Order Lepidop- tera) at 15.7% and the “true flies” (Order Diptera) at 15.2%. Mollusca: Newly described fossil Mollusca species easily surpassed the newly described fossil Insecta (n=327) in 2008. Over one-fifth of the new fossil animalia species in 2008 were mollusks (n = 448) and was by far, the greatest number of new fossils across all animal Phyla and Classes. Gastropoda: The gastropod Class— terrestrial, marine and freshwater slugs and snails — comprised the vast majority of the 880 new living species of mollusks described in 2008 (83.0%). Almost 60% of the new gastropods described in 2008 were the marine Hypsogastropoda (or seasnails). SOS Report 3 Species Bites & facts Crustacea: 1,014 extant Crustacea were newly described in 2008 and of these, over 46% were in the Class Ostracoda, or seed shrimp. Reports of known or described living Crustracean are estimated at 50,000 species. Within Crustracea, the Ostracoda class has 65,000 total species with approximately 20% of those species living (Brusca, R.C. and G.J. Brusca. Invertebrates. 2nd edition . Sinauer Associ- ates, Sunderland, MA. 936 pp). In 2008, 594 new ostracods were described and of those, 21.2% were fossils. Arachnida: Over 90% of the 1,320 extant Arachnida species newly described in 2008 were in two Or- ders: Araneae (n = 612) — the spiders — and the Acari (n = 578) e.g., ticks and mites.