Species Disappearing Faster Than We Can Count -
We are losing species, by some counts, at a rate of more than 25,000 a year, which is a lot faster than we are discovering them.
In 2012, a sneezing monkey, a spongy mushroom, and a blue tarantula became official earthly inhabitants alongside more than 15,000 other new discoveries. Some of these species are more than just wondrous creatures, their existence could have broad implications. A wild rice species discovered in the 1970s was hybridized, and increased the world’s rice production nearly fourfold. To this day, that rice provides food in places where it would otherwise be scarce. Every time we discover a new species, it could be a link to health, food, medicine: something that can help what ails us.
Over the years, scientist have come up with wildly varying estimates of how many species live on earth, ranging from 3 million to 100 million. In the summer of 2011, Camilo Mora, a biodiversity researcher at the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, in collaboration with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, released a study in PLoS Biology saying the Earth is home to about 8.7 million species. It was the most precise calculation ever offered