Question: how many species of animals are there?
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you guys must work very hard. i never knew there is more species to be discovered.
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Finding new species is usually done in just our normal projects. Every time I get sample and have to collect the animals I’m doing my work but keeping an eagle-eye out for anything that might be a new species. There is still lots to be found!
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There is some very interesting information i never knew about on that website.
Thanks Shona. 🙂
dmath56
Hi dmath56 and awesomegal03,
This is a difficult question to answer definitively because it is impossible to actually count every single species, there are just sooooooooooooo many. Scientists have to make educated guesses based on what information they have collected, but there are many species out there that we haven’t even discovered yet, so we need to use statistics to get a more accurate number. The estimated number of animals on our planet falls somewhere in the vast range of 3-30 million species (According to Erwin 1983, Wolosz 1988).
If we were to divide all animals into two groups, invertebrates and vertebrates, an estimated 97% of all species would be invertebrates. Invertebrates include animals that lack backbones such as sponges, many marine creatures and insects. Of all invertebrates, the insects are by far the most numerous. There are so many species of insects that scientists have yet to discover them all, let alone name or count them (which is why I was so interested in them). Estimates of the total number of insect fall in the range of 1 to 30 million. The vertebrates represent the remaining 3% of all species and include species that are the most familiar to us: amphibians, reptiles, birds, fishes, mammals.
I got this information from this link: https://animals.about.com/od/zoologybasics/a/howmanyspecies.htm
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Great answer Blaire.
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Great answer Blaire.
Over the past few years there has been a project called the Census of Marine Life. Over 80 nations with over 2700 scientist worked in a 10-year scientific project (540 exhibitions and surveys) to explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans only.
First the census compiled and catalogued the known marine life species – 30 million records as of January 2011 and this is still counting as new species are discovered and published. This is only marine life, not life on land.
During the 10 years that this project ran surveys more than 1200 new marine species were published and there are still another 5,000 or more species waiting to be described and named.
You can read about the Census on their website https://www.coml.org/about-census
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