How much of Earth's life is still undiscovered?

If you, like us, clicked on the cute cat photos posted everywhere recently, announcing the discovery of the first new cat species in more than a century, you might have wondered how rare it is to find a new species. Turns out, it’s not! We live in an era of “unprecedented” discovery, says John Wiens https://eeb.arizona.edu/person/john-wiens, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. And scientists say we’re still just scratching at the surface of how much life exists on Earth. Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  Gina B, hey.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Hey, Nate.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Hey, so question.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Did you just see this new cat species that was discovered? First one in over 100 years?

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, everyone's talking about it, like at my hairdressers, like on the metro, yes.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  It's the buzz.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  It's super cute, like small, and it has leopard spots, kind of. Apparently, somebody took this cat home after finding it in this, like, Bolivian cloud forest because they thought it was a kitten. But after a year, it wasn't really growing, and they started to suspect it might not be a house cat.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I love this story. Yeah, it ended up in Sendeverde Wildlife Sanctuary, where its DNA was sequenced. And low and behold, yes, it was a new species. They named it Leopardenis tilkaya, which I hope I'm saying right.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also heard there's this new penguin species that was discovered just recently. Again, first one in like 100 years.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So these penguins were found in the aptly named Desolation Islands in the sub Antarctic region, very hard to get to, which kind of helps explain why it took so long for scientists to genetically test these animals. But they recently did, and yeah, again, they were, in fact, a new species.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, learning about this new cat and this new penguin species, you know, the first of each in a century, it makes me feel like it's really rare to find new species. But I know that we've done stories, and Nate, you've been reporting on how it's actually more common than I thought, like how we're discovering new species all the time.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, do you want a fun factoid, Gina?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yes, of course.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  For animals, about 15% of all known species have been discovered in the past 20 years or so.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  What? That is a huge percentage for 20 years?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very recent. So that's John Wiens. He's a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. And I interviewed him about a study he published that shows today, like right now, we are discovering and describing more species than at any time in human history.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  So like hundreds of new fish species, about 100 new amphibian species per year, and about 100 new reptile species per year, especially lizards and snakes.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  These numbers are like blowing my mind.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in total, he says, we discover about 16,000 new species every year. So insects, arthropods, plants, fungi, and we're just scratching the surface of how much life there is yet to be discovered on Earth.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Just like tons of species out there. We would say it's a poorly known planet that we live on.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  So today on the show, an effort to discover and genetically catalog every living thing on the planet.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  And why the discovery of a new cat, or penguin, or any species, isn't just cool, but could have direct implications on your life. I'm Nate Rott.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:46Speaker 02

  Okay, Nate, I think I'm still trying to get my head around the fact we're discovering about 16,000 new species every year. Like, how is that even possible?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I mean, well, look, Gina, like, a lot of them aren't as photogenic as that, you know, spotted cat.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  So cute.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  That you and, you know, your hairdresser and lots of other people have seen on their social media feeds.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  There are insects, or crustaceans, invertebrates that live in the oceans or under our feet. There are more than 350,000 described species of beetles on the planet that we know of just alone.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  And when you say described, you mean species that scientists have taxonomically categorized?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so back in the 1700s, a Swedish biologist named Carl Linnaeus, who had fantastically curly hair, Gina, it was probably a wig.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Created this system of classifying animals that we still use today. So anyone listening probably remembers it from their middle school or high school science classes. Domain, kingdom, phylum. Gina, do you remember the rest?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  No, like, no, I'm terrible at biology.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so class, order, family, genus, species. And so using that system, scientists have described roughly 2.5 million species on the planet so far.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  2.5 million, that's so much.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's roughly the number of people that live in Chicago or Houston.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  But obviously, there's a lot more out there if we're discovering 16,000 per year. Do they have an estimate on how many, like, more distinct species are there out there?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  I mean, so Gina, that is a very good question. And I can say that because I asked the exact same thing to John.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Good.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  The range of estimates of how many species are out there are from the low millions to the low trillions.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Trillions?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yes, t-trillions. And John says he personally thinks it's somewhere between the low hundreds of millions up to the low billions.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  And a lot of that diversity, we think, is associated with things living inside of insects. So like, your average insect is maybe walking around with its own mite species and its own nematode species, and its own species of this weird unicellular fungus called a microsporidium, and its own apicomplexan proteist, and then, most importantly, like, maybe around eight or so bacterial species. So if you kind of crunch those numbers and start with 6 million species, then you start getting up into these, you know, these ridiculous numbers in the hundreds of millions.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I really, really like this. It's almost as if, like, every insect is a whole world unto itself.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And, you know, when we're talking about microscopic life, like bacteria, obviously, that's not something a biologist like John can, like, easily find and describe, which is why a lot of scientists are increasingly using genetic data to tell species apart.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Like, how the scientists determined this cat and, like, this penguin species were unique species?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, you know, after I talked to John about this, I kind of went down this rabbit hole, Gina, because, I don't know about you, but I just think it's like so cool that there's so much life on this planet that we haven't even discovered yet.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Like, we spend all of this time talking about whether there's life in space when,

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I do.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? Like, I do too, because I'm curious. But based on some of these estimates, we've only discovered a fraction of what exists on Earth. And this rabbit hole brought me to a genomic scientist named Harris Lewin, who's the former co-chair of something called the Earth Biogenome Project.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  That totally sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Well, Harris himself described it as a biological moonshot. The goal of this project is to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes, the biological blueprints, of every known single and multicelled organism on Earth.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  We think that that archive of life, sort of a, you know, a Noah's Ark of genomes, collecting all this information will be useful for future generations.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  And what does he mean by useful? Does he mean, like, bringing animals back from extinction?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe you could bring something back from extinction, right? But it could also be used to help prevent an animal or a plant from even getting to that point.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  So scientists are already using genetics to clone federally endangered black-footed ferrets, they're using genetics to identify corals that can better survive warmer oceans, and they're using it to discover that some species that look very much alike are actually genetically distinct, like what happened with this new cat species. Maybe the biggest example of this are African elephants, which we long assumed were one species, but have since found are actually two: forest elephants and savanna.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  I did not know that. Okay, let's like zoom out in general. So if you're like, thinking a population or a species is like doing fine because there's a good amount of them, and then suddenly you realize they're actually smaller populations of multiple species, things are not maybe fine.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it can be a tool for species conservation, because, yeah, a lot of species are at risk of extinction right now from habitat loss, over-exploitation, and, you know, increasingly climate change.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  And, you know, we've seen these periods in Earth's history where climate has caused these mass extinctions, so we know that this is not far-fetched possibility. And so we want to first, you know, make sure we have a digital archive of everything that, you know, alive on this planet today, because it's the product of Several billion years of evolution of life on Earth.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I find this like a really interesting way to look at it. Like what we have right now is actually a record of billions of years of evolution.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and you know this, Gina, like species evolve to adapt to problems, right? So they grow bigger beaks to break bigger nuts. They adapt to use echolocation to hunt for bugs at night. They adapt to pathogens and temperatures and limited resources. So, you know, if you extend that idea outwards and think of some of the challenges that we are facing as humans, Harris would argue.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  All the solutions are out there somewhere for most of the problems that we have.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, that's so hopeful. Oh, my God, they're just waiting to be discovered.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So, you know, think about medicine.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  80% of our pharmaceuticals have origins in natural products. And, you know, we've only sequenced a little bit more than 1% of biodiversity. There's a whole pharmacopeia out there.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  GLP-1s, the weight loss drugs that scientists are finding have all kinds of other potential benefits. Those can be traced back to the venom and saliva of Gila monsters.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, having the whole genome of different animals and bacteria could help scientists better identify the sources of new diseases and could also allow them to more quickly come up with cures, like antitoxin and antidotes also exist in nature. Then there's agriculture, you know, Gina, feeding the world, which is already a problem in some parts, as you know.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of people to feed.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Harris says, you know, getting the whole genome sequences of different plants and pests could help us find wild variants of existing crops that are, you know, more resistant to drought or heat, or ones that have natural defenses against diseases or pests. And those genes could then be spliced into our foods.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Which we already have been doing for a long time.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so can I ask, how feasible is this? I mean, we've been talking about how we've only been scratching the surface of how much life is on Earth. How can we possibly genetically sequence all of it?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a great question. And, you know, Harris is optimistic, in part because technology is advancing so fast. And, you know, because the cost of doing full reference genomes, which are, you know, the complete genetic sequence of an organism, those have come down so much. Like, Gina, do you remember the Human Genome Project?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally do. This was this huge scientific effort to make the first genetic map of us, you know, of people.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it took more than a decade and was completed in 2003, and it cost $3 billion to do this. Harris says the reference genomes they're able to make today are so much better and so much cheaper.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  So we're producing now genomes for tens of thousands of dollars that it costs $3 billion and is nowhere near the quality of what we produce today.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  This makes me feel like it's an exciting time to be a geneticist.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I mean, certainly, yeah. If you're looking at genetics, this is a very exciting time. And I've heard a lot of optimism from people I've talked to, not just Harris. But there are also a lot of challenges here. You know, a lot of scientific funding in the US has gotten cut in the last couple of years. Harris says there's a big question around equity, which I thought was really interesting. So like, if scientists find the genetics of some salamander in Central America, there's a way to regenerate human limbs, how do you make sure that the country it's discovered in shares in the economic gains from that discovery?

• 13:35Speaker 05

  And we're very constrained by all this nationalism, which is going on now around the world. There are countries that are saying nothing leaves, you know? And nothing is not just the sample. Nothing means no digital sequence information, unless we can guarantee that we're going to benefit in some way.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are really important things to think about.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Totally. And then, you know, probably, Gina, the most obvious challenge to this whole thing is just the scale of it. After you've done genetically mapping all the stuff we can find in our backyards or by doing some fishing, you know, there's still a lot of stuff out there.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  And the depths of the ocean and the reaches of some, you know, peak in Afghanistan somewhere, an endemic species in Uzbekistan or Antarctica, these are hard things. And, you know, to get to every last one is going to take a really robust strategy and significant funding.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Nate, thank you so much for taking us on this rabbit hole with you. And I never thought, like, clicking on a picture of this new cute cat and reading about it would open up such a world of animal discovery.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Well, Gina, it is a wild world out there. So next time, can we agree that we're going to just tag along with some of those scientists in Uzbekistan and find some rare DNA?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yes, I can promise that. Now we have to find the money.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Berlin McCoy and edited by Lauren Gonzalez.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I'm Regina Barber.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And I'm Nate Rodd.

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  Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.

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