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
There are a few ways!
One way that we know that there are many undiscovered species in many taxa is to basically plot the cumulative number of species known over time. If the number is still increasing rapidly, there’s probably still *way* more out there. And there are some types of creature we’ve probably discovered all of- for instance, it’s been a long time since we’ve discovered a new species as large as an elephant (or even as large as a bison); it’s unlikely that we’ve managed to miss any. But there are tons of mites that live in soil, and wherever we look there’s likely to be new ones!
To get an estimate of *how many* more are out there, we can make estimates! A lot of the undocumented diversity is in places like rainforests. Scientists can go to a rainforest and VERY intensively document *everything* in a small area (for instance, tenting and fogging a single tree, or every single plant in a 100x100m plot), and determine what proportion of the organisms encountered were previously undocumented. Then, knowing how much more uninvestigated habitat there is, they can extrapolate how many other undocumented species there may be in that or similar ecosystems.
Sort of like, if you weren’t sure how many kids went to your kid’s school, you could count how many there were in your kid’s class, count how many teachers are listed, and multiply to get a reasonable estimate. It might be that kindergarten classes are smaller than 5th grade classes, and there will be class to class variation so you wouldn’t get an exact number with that method, but it would be pretty good.
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