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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Every blade of grass, every fish and fowl, slug and snail, has a place on the Web.
Oct 28, 2002 | David Maddison, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, specializes in the evolution of beetles -- not all beetles everywhere in all eras, just a subgroup of present-day ground beetles known as carabids.
Maddison's specialty may sound comically narrow, but his purview includes no less than 30,000 species. And not even an expert like Maddison can keep track of all the connections that link those tens of thousands of different bugs, much less the rest of the insects and fungi, plants and animals living on earth. There are between 1.5 and 1.7 million known species today, with millions more as yet undiscovered.
"The average layperson thinks that we know about 99 percent of the species that occur on the earth, and that's the farthest thing from the truth," says Gary Waggoner, a botanist at the Center for Biological Informatics at the United States Geological Survey. "On a global scale, we know maybe 10 percent of what's out there, and the remaining 90 percent have yet to be discovered and described and classified."
Estimates of the number of species on earth range from 5 million to as high as 100 million, with many researchers guessing in the 30 million range, says Ryan Phelan, CEO of the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit that has set a moon-shot goal for science of cataloging all life on earth within 25 years.
But the push to uncover new species faces many obstacles. Scientists, even specialists in the same narrow field, often literally can't figure out what their counterparts are talking about. A single well-known species, like, say, a quaking aspen, can go by a dozen different scientific names at different times and in different cultures -- and that's not even counting the common names. "It was a real problem," says Waggoner, who has worked on a taxonomic index database for the U.S. government since 1993. "People who called things by different names from different parts of the country would get together and discuss things, and that confusion would foster debates."
The result is a colossal taxonomic cross-indexing problem, with no easy way of getting your beetle: "The vast majority of what we know is actually sitting on dusty library shelves and not in electronic form," laments Maddison.
Enter the Internet, a taxonomist's best friend. Maddison and Waggoner and many other researchers are busily data-mining life on earth, using the Web to create a collective memory of all living (and dead) species. They're pitting database architecture against the mysteries of nature.
