A new study has found that the rate at which new species are being discovered is speeding up.
University of Arizona biology professor John Weins led the study and set out to understand how the diversity of life has been understood over the last 300 years, especially because there are few large scale studies on species discovery rates.
“Which groups are growing the most quickly, has the rate been constant over time?," Wiens said.
His research found that about 16,000 new species have been documented every year since 2015. Some of the fastest discovery rates were among beetles, insects and ray-finned fishes.
Wiens says understanding the rate is critical.
“These species are basically invisible to conservation until they're formally described, right? And so, if people don't go out and describe these things, they could be lost before we even know about them," Wiens said.
The study also found that the rate of discovery of new species is far outpacing how quickly species are going extinct.
"sort of the good news is that it's actually pretty low at this point. You know, it's maybe 10 species or fewer per year. But we think that there's some unknown number of species that are going extinct before they can be described. So to really have an understanding of what we're losing, we need to get out there and describe as many species as we can," Wiens said.
Wiens said there are about 2.5 million species documented currently, but that the true number could be in the 10s to 100s of millions.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
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