How do you know that 90% of species are undiscovered if they are undiscovered? how do you know they are there if you haven’t discovered them yet?

Question

Everyone keeps saying its like a list, how does that work?? Do you have like a pokedex where the undiscovered species appear in grey or something like that???

In: Biology

Answer 1

For me, its a lot like the question “how many American Indians died during the conquering of what is now the USA by the greedy rest if the world?”

There isn’t really a good way to know. It’s somewhere in the millions, but we have no idea how many when it comes down to it. A couple million? A couple hundred million?. It’s not as if everything was documented.

It’s just an educated guess. It could be more like 50%, or even 20%, but because there’s no good way to measure it, it’s easier to assume that there is SO MANY SPECIES we haven’t logged that we probably could never count them all.

And for the sake of influencing future scientists from younger generations, it’s better to say “go find out!” And encite scientific exploration.

I’m sure you read of DNA shotguning in the other posts. That process leads to so much unknown material that having a number for the percentage unknown… is going to be high.