Of course any estimates that scientists make are "made up". But estimating the number of unseen species is a very old problem in statistics with a lot of rigorous research, including an important approach by Alan Turing.
For intuition of how this is possible, imagine you sample k butterflies independently and all of them come from different species. By the birthday paradox, if there were less than k^2/2 different species, you would expect to see at least one pair from the same species, so you can estimate that there are more than k^2/2 different species.
With statistics you can estimate anything and everything, in multiple ways. I'll start giving due importance to this approach when the 9 million number is shown to be accurate. Until then, color me skeptical.
It's made up, but definitely a better estimate than both 2^100 and the current number of known species. I imagine one way to obtain a coarse estimate would be fitting the number of known species over time to a curve like N-e^-kt curve and then using N as the estimate. Coarse, but not terrible if you can quantify the expected error.
People have come up with vastly different answers to this question. That to me heavily implies "i don't know" is the only right answer at this time.
"Researchers have come up with wide-ranging estimates for how many species there are. As May points out, this ranges anywhere from 3 to well over 100 million – many orders of magnitude of difference. Some more recent studies estimate that this figure is as much as one trillion."
How many of these unidentified species are animals scientists gave seen before, but previously considered to be members of another very closely related species? It seems like that is how most new species discoveries work; not the discovery of an animal never before seen but rather the discovery that one previously documented species is actually two species.
A species' discovery is never about first "seen", it's first described. There's no way to know whom first saw it.
Your assumption regarding splitting known species is wrong as it comes to numbers. It often happens for birds but this doesn't move the needle as there's only 10K birds.
Almost every species on this planet is an arthropod and most are not described. It's trivially easy to "discover" new ones. Go to a bio-diverse area (say a jungle) and fill a wheelbarrow with soil. Filter the dirt and describe anything you find. It will take you forever but there will be dozens if not hundreds of "new" species. The main bottleneck is not finding them, it's describing them, which is very time consuming.
Put some specialized lights up in the same area at night. One remote site I attended in Colombia discovered on average 20 new species of moth every single day. There's expected to be 150K moth species, which still may be an underestimation.
And this doesn't even describe the truly tiny organisms living in soil and rivers and oceans.
As it comes to species, the public has a bias for mammals and birds. Combined they're about 17-18K species only. Not even a drop in the ocean. You can split each of them into 10 separate species and this still doesn't do anything to inflate the total amount of species.
It's complicated. If you're a tourist and just stumbled upon a species not yet described, that's only the start.
Next is a whole lot of work to actually describe it which a tourist would typically not be doing, so the idea that you should get naming credit is not a given. There's no hard rule for it.
You can definitely give input for the name, and there's rules to naming. You can't name it after a company, for example.
The most generous example I've seen is a research organization where you can "buy" a species name. Within taxonomy rules, you can decide on a name for a fee, even if you didn't discover the species at all. It's a way to fund research.
In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.
> In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.
Ah, so wait, is there a central taxonomy office (or at least relatively centralized ones for different species groups) that is basically backlogged like a government passport office? Is that how it works?
In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority.
But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status.
All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.
Please don't make false accusations about a third part without a minimum understanding of the matter first.
Nueva Pescanova has nothing to do with this case, and I doubt that they would be interested at all in breeding a deep sea (and, most probably, non edible) species.
Deep sea cephalopods accumulate ammonia in their body as a buoyant device. This way, they don't need to spend so much energy swimming. Ammonia is fairly toxic, so they would taste either like pee, or like poison. I had touched some of this animals and the smell of rancid fat and urine last for days in your hands
Also if you put this animals at the surface they will literally burst from inside and turn into a mushy mess. I had explained this yet a few times before, but for some reason this particular Muusoctopus nursery is a recurrent history on HN.
Octopuses are benthic, so they could store a different amount of ammonia, but my bet would be that such partially disintegrated octopus product would look and taste awful. None of the other species of deep sea octopuses are fished commercially.
Hongeo-hoe is a type of fermented fish dish from Korea's Jeolla province. Hongeo-hoe is made from skate and emits a very strong, characteristic ammonia-like odor
Skates (hongeo) are cartilaginous fish that excrete uric acid through the skin, rather than by urinating as other animals do. As they ferment, ammonia is produced, which helps preserve the flesh and gives the fish its distinctive, powerful odor.
I know that some sharks and rays had a more or less strong pee taste. I personally dislike it. Skate is the only dish that I would classify as dog food grade. The line between tasty and nasty is very thin in those fishes and requires a skilled chef.
But I'm perfectly fine with the idea of some people loving the pee taste, or eating rotten shark meat, or urinating in other people's mouths while eating carp croquettes. As long as those people is not me, good for them. I'll pass. Thank you.
Feel free to eat this new discovered octopus before any other human and tell us about your experience. My bet is that will be memorable for all the wrong reasons
In any case, skate meat should be forbidden by conservation issues. Their populations are very fragile and on a sharp decline, and to eat this animals is very irresponsible.
The ammonia content of Greenland Shark doesn't prevent them from being a treat:
The traditional method begins with gutting and beheading a shark and placing it in a shallow hole dug in gravelly sand, with the cleaned cavity resting on a small mound of sand. The shark is then covered with sand and gravel, and stones are placed on top of the sand in order to press the fluids out of the body. The shark ferments in this fashion for six to twelve weeks, depending on the season. Following this curing period, the shark is cut into strips and hung to dry for several months. During this drying period, a brown crust will develop, which is removed prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.
TYFYS, doing your part to Stop The Spread of dis-and-or-misinformation!
I usually accept any given internet comment as unimpeachable truth, and was just about to fire off a bunch of angry hate mail to Nueva Pescanova because of this specific thing!
Gosh, would I have felt silly to find out that they're not literally building cages for this particular species!
Do you have a source for your claim that nobody in this company is currently planning to build cages 10,000' underwater for a species that was just discovered?
"I reckon if you want to eat meat still you should mostly be eating chicken. "
But favorably chicken that has seen the sun and real soil to pick in, not only on the way to the slaughterhouse.
And there is nothing inheritently wrong with fishing, it is just that the way it is usually done, is quite horrific. But there is somewhat certified ethical fishing. Or local fishermen.
The massive problem with fishing is that the fish are wild. They need to get replaced by nature. You can’t scale up the operation. Add to that pollution, warming seas, and you’re disturbing a system way too much.
What’s the plan once the oceans are messed up permanently?
At this moment, I think factory farmed chicken would have less impact on the environment.
At this point wouldn’t it be easier to artificially select for traits that make the chicken mind more tolerant of poor conditions? Like if we can have consciousless chicken then it wouldn’t matter the condition they grow under?
It sounds way easier, to continue to pretend, that animals don't have feelings. And in general not know too much of the meat factories. Which is why many people choose this approach.
Also like the sibling comment said, not really possible with our tech and knowledge. Lab grown meat would be the way to go to achieve it.
That is one heck of a story. Salient to discussion about consciousness: to what extent does the ability to act like awareness, count as awareness for the purposes of outside observers?
You would need a clearer working model of consciousnes to be able to know whether your efforts were succeeding. But this is the idea behind lab-grown meat, just don't grow the brain at all and you don't have to worry as much.
There are other reasons than environmental for eating fish but not meat.
I used to be pescatarian and my main reason for that was factory farming. Once reason I now eat meat is that it has become a lot easier to buy meat that has been well treated.
Before I was a programmer, I was a marine biologist and also worked as a fish farmer.
By virtually all metrics, intensive land-based animal farming is much harder on the environment. Also, in terms of animal welfare, its super sketchy even with animals labeled organic.
The misinformation around fish farming is absurd. I think people want to believe in the myth that commercial fishing is a couple guys in a wooden boat; when its actually a floating factory discarding up to half or more of what it kills.
There are many aquatic things I won't eat but mostly it is of the "wild fish" variety (overfishing, pollution, mercury, bycatch). I worked a single season as a fisheries observer in Alaska. The destruction was maddening.
I put wild fish in quotes because many times they are raised in a hatcheries then released into the wild. Which has ruined the gene pool of salmon in places that do this.
After a few years raising chickens at my home farm, I became pescatarian. I drew an arbitrary line at intelligence where I wouldn't eat anything as smart or smarter than a chicken.
Anyhow, avoiding farmed fish while eating land meat is really misinformed. I think the meat industry and commercial fishing industries have managed to completely misinform the American public (and a few well-meaning but misleading documentaries on the subject).
America doesn't not farm very many aquatic things besides oysters, trout and catfish. Which are all very very green industries. I like to bring these ones up in conversations about this topic.
I think it's more to do with us being able to empathize more easily with other land animals because we're biologically similar. Fish can't scream in pain or show basically any emotion we'd recognize at all. They're so different it's like looking at a wiggling steak, so it's trivial to dismiss them as simple automatons.
Hunting/fishing for food was really more ethical many millennia ago, when humans were fewer than wild terrestrial vertebrates.
Nowadays, there are many more humans and domestic animals than wild terrestrial vertebrates, so hunting could not sustain any non-negligible fraction of the humans.
The modern methods of fishing are much too wasteful, so neither fishing has any future.
Nah fishing wild is better assuming your catch rate is sustainable for the population. Farming means taking acres of natural area with a careful web of ecological interactions that took millions of years to develop as such, and replacing all of that with a temperamental monocrop sometimes as far as the eye can see. It would be like if we fished by first sterilizing the ocean and then growing up some goldfish.
The discovery of these new octopus species contributes to our understanding of the diversity and evolution of cephalopods. It also highlights the importance of ongoing research and exploration to uncover the hidden wonders of the marine environment.
I'm pretty sure someone who has accumulated deep knowledge and expertise on NSE gets paid a lot more for their time. Unless you're talking about ChatGPT computational time?
I think rockets have this unmatched spectacle, especially for those born in a certain time. Submarine exploration is really cool, but I don't imagine the launching of a new submarine explorer is going to match the momentous-ness of the launch of a new rocket.
There's also just a kind of social narrative issue, where space is cool because sci-fi and aliens and astrophysics, while the deep oceans are scary because dark and unknown and shipwrecks. I guess it's like "if we explore space, we might find alien life; if we explore the oceans, we might find a really weird fish".
Yeah, space and oceans have always had these contrasting images.
Space is equated to future(potential expedition target for humanity leaving earth) while oceans remind us of the past i.e. submerged & lost cities, ships etc. and honestly very few people are excited to explore the past.
Space is also out there and oceans are here. You can point to the sky and say that's what we are aiming and people will relate compared to "we are planning to explore xyz trench 500 miles north of abc island".
Well going into space has clear advantages for our species. Firstly, it provides a backup in case something happens to earth, like if it gets hit by an asteroid. It could also potentially be untouched by a nasty war on earth, but odds are it would get dragged into it. Secondly there are commercial possibilities like mining in space, or space real estate . Thirdly, astronomy is one of two ways we expand our knowledge of physics (the other being particle accelerators), and new physics can lead to good things down the line.
There are benefits of exploring the oceans too, like maybe finding some missing link species and learning about biology maybe some geology. But they seem much lesser to me.
Totally agree. While space exploration is an exciting endeavor, it is essential to prioritize the exploration of Earth first. By understanding our own planet, we can develop the knowledge, technologies, and inspiration necessary for responsible and successful exploration beyond Earth.
All these lidar projects keep finding ancient ruins and structures in the Amazonian rainforests. Imagine what a planet wide lidar project would find, especially in coastal regions that are now underwater.
This might sounds snarky, but I'm serious when I say if we want to know more about the oceans, Hollywood is going to have to come up with a better ocean competitor to Star Trek than 'SeaQuest DSV'. For better or worse, public interest is driven by popular entertainment, and there's maybe one interesting under the water movie once a decade.
It's not exactly that simple, especially the part where AI would somehow differentiate extremely visually similar species from each other, while in near-complete darkness and on the move.
> especially the part where AI would somehow differentiate extremely visually similar species from each other
We have an AI for this exact task now, Seek by iNaturalist. It keeps getting rave reviews.
The only problem is that it's terrible at identifying things. I have a picture of an elephant seal that it is certain actually shows a clouded monitor lizard.
> News that the world's first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent "sentient" creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.
I really don't get the dismay. Sheep, cows, fish even, feel pain and probably feel emotions. So why stop now? It's such an arbitrary line.
Speaking personally, I wish we'd stopped sooner. I'm not here to say all meat is bad and everyone should be vegan, but I don't feel it's out of bounds to be dismayed that we're expanding the barbarity to new animals that clearly appear to have a form of higher intelligence.
I'm not the arbiter of truth on this, but I'm sad when I see pigs in factory farms, and I'm every bit as dismayed to see us expanding this to cephalopods just the same as if we expanded this to domestic canines.
Traditions (old habits + time passed) and rationalizing make people comfortable with eating most animals.
Then, it's easy to grow a conscience when confronted to trendy newish things like so-called sentient animals we never really ate before.
This is a good thing. Growing the masse's consciousness through new fads and phenomenons is a great way to create cognitive dissonance that contribute to changing old habits. Even if one will always encounter resistance to change.
However, the current consensus is that consciousness/sentience is a gradient. The higher the sentience, the higher the ability to experience (anything, including pain and emotions).
We believe humans to be more sentient than octopi, which are more sentient than cows, which are more sentient than fish, which are more sentient than yeast.
We might be wrong of course. It's probably impossible to even ever find out. But no one cares about hurting yeast.
Who is to say a plant does or doesn’t like getting ripped apart either? You can take this logic further and realize its all just culural biases. Life is life at the cellular level, we all have mitochondria and similar fundamental metabolisms. Yet when those cells become a complex organism we start to get a sense of bias toward complex life. Even more so when we start considering concious thought. All that being said its still just bias towards one specific niche of life, that of a multicellular organism with a human centric definition of thought or consciousness. I’m sure many a vegetarians still swat at flies without considering how ironic that is.
Fishes can be very intelligent in fact. Many are more clever than mammals of its same size for sure.
They can do basically anything that a bird does, but underwater, and also a lot of tricks that we can't do.
There is not a single bird or mammal crystal transparent, or electrical, or bioluminiscent, or that could change their color at will in seconds. If I remember correctly, the vertebrates with the biggest brain/body weight ratio, or the fastest movement registered, are fishes.
Imagine an ecosystem where living things don't eat eachother and live in full cooperation and harmony. No chance to ingest the biological building blocks created by other organisms. No evolutionary pressure to develop defenses or hunting strategies, etc...
Now ask yourself if the level of sentience that develops in this environment is satisfactory. Is there even a chance of developing thinking matter that can have a debate about ethics?
I recently read a sci-fi short story that describes an alien forest that has no predation, only vicious instant scavenging the moment something dies. The colonists wear light-suits to prevent brutal death because only the dead indigenous lifeforms create no light.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/biodiversi...