Biology 3484A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Lesula, Arthropod, Luehea
29 May 2016
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Best human guess for distinct life forms on earth are in the range of 5 mill- 10 mill eukaryotes (this is not counting the viruses and bacteria). However some guesses are high as 100 million or as low as 3 million. Only began systematically naming species a little over 2 centuries ago. Most taxonomists (1/3) work on vertebrates (only accounting for 1% of the total number of species), 1/3 on plants (10%), and the remaining on invertebrates (comprising at least 90%), particularly arthropods. Problems arise where synonyms- same species catalogued differently in different collections, therefore we are not sure by about 10% how many distinct species we have actually named and recorded. Hamilton et al. began with a study of the number of beetle species found in the canopy of a single tropical tree species (luehea seemannii). Then erwin pyramided this though a chain of argument into an estimate of 30-100 million tropical arthropods.
