Currently reading The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson. Wanted to read his book about ants but it was not available/deliverable/ebook. So purchased this on kindle. Have read only about 30%. But some of the things are new. I expected it to be a refresher course after a few of David Attenborough documentaries. But some of the things are new. Like how do we define species. A lot of these things are available on wikipedia. But I think it helps if you take time to read books and then explore further on the web.
Also liked and would recommend very highly Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (so many new things to know).
Leaving this comment here just in case someone is interested.
I was really surprised to learn how vague the concept of a species really is. Nature is so complex and varied that it is impossible to provide one definition of species which can be applied to all life.
It's kinda weird to immediately jump to conclusion that a species is extinct after not seeing it for few years, when it's so rare that it eluded discovery until 2011.
Nothing odd about that. The popular concept of a beehive is a style of sociality specific to honeybees, which aren't even native to North America. It's only their economic importance that leads them to be regarded as the "standard" bee.
Last time I read about bee's I found that bees range from totally solitary, to gregarious, to communal, to a large number of eusocial colonial species.
I live in Australia and have gardened for decades paying attention to bees and other insects around me. The first time (just recently) that my parents talked to me about blue-banded bees, I was convinced they were trying to trick me. I had never seen one in my 40ish years. They've since sent me photos of two that they've encountered.
It's quite heartwarming to see how resilient nature is. A lot of near extinct species seems to be making a comeback with the coronavirus slowing down human activity. In a way humans are the real virus lol
I get the sentiment, but let us take a moment to remember that truly extinct species are not coming back, only those which were thought to be extinct or close to extinction.
We should not think that a 6 month shutdown will undo all atrocities of man or nature
I pray to God that there's an Archive.org for biology somewhere, that scientists are trying to sequence the genome of every possible species that we can find, just so that we can give _something_ to the future before we wipe it all out. I'd even settle for the dystopian version where a biotech company does it just to patent all of the genes that nature has already paid the cost to evolve.
Yup, the old myth of holocene park... it does not matter if species go extinct as long as they are all saved in our hard disk. Somebody will eventually fix it in the future. Somebody with unlimited life points and infinite money and a planet sized room.
I am not sure that we are at that tech level yet to resurrect creatures from DNA. Even if we had DNA, do we need multiple for each species (diversity, male/female and how many, drone, worker, queen (if I remember correctly queen is made just by feeding it with special food))?
It is not that easy to recreate living beings, last year we succeeded with simple microorganism.
There is an issue of epigenetics and how information transfer beyond what is written in DNA letters. It would be nice if someone with degree could elaborate.
And what to do with knowledge transfer? What is minimum for a creature to survive?
I guess, for now best way we have is just a simple preservation, within nature reserves.
Correct, DNA is just one element of a complete organismal informatics, you need vastly more than just the genome sequence to ressurect a species. Relatively simple microbes, or recently extinct mammals where you have a semi-plausible scheme involving suitable host cells and embryo implantation technology are exceptional cases.
One thing to realize is there are significant numbers of species that have such complex ecological dependencies that we don't know how to keep them alive outside of their natural habitat anyway, even if we could manufacture them from scratch. I've worked in labs studying mycorrhizal fungi, parasitic and mycoheterotrophic plants, soil protists, rare insects... Often, even if the species is well-characterized and we have plenty of living samples, the life-cycle still cannot be completed and a viable population cannot be maintained in artificial conditions.
Environmental genomic sampling is relatively easy to do, trendy, easy to get funding for. Conservation biology produces vast amounts of this data. But it mostly serves as an "ark" in terms of individual genes, gene products, limited gene networks, not the integrated individual. We've got very good at collating and maintaining vast databases of this stuff and very bad at stopping the actual biodiversity getting destroyed. Research on "how actually do we keep more species alive in the first place" does not get enough money or attention.
That is a serious "quotation needed" statement. How can you even know you know about all relevant ecosystems when you are missing 90% of species? Besides, just knowing about the "keystones" of an ecosystem is required but not sufficient.
As an analogy, if you knew the top 10% keystone chemicals that make up the human body but did not know the long tail of the other 90%, you'd likely miss out on a lot of the details that make it all work like immune system cells and vitamins. Just because a molecule (or species) is rare does not make it non-essential.
I hope we are building a statistical model of which one is eating which to map where are the missing pieces of the puzzle and direct our focus of research.
From The Diversity Of Life by Edward O. Wilson
(These numbers are for recognized species.) This does not answer the "only 10% known" part. However, the part where the author says 13000 new species recognized every year should give an idea. Also this is about species not members under those species. And from the same book "Bacteria continue to be the “black hole” of biodiversity, their depths unplumbed."
"How many species? The estimates I made in 1986 and cited in The Diversity of Life (1992) put the number of recognized living species in the world— in other words, those formally described and bearing two-part scientific names— at approximately 1.4 million.
About 13,000 additional “new” species are recognized each year. Thus in the decade since 1986 more than 100,000 species have been added, bringing the total as I counted it to 1.5 million. Meanwhile, the numbers in some important groups have been revised upward— in particular in the insects, the largest of all groups, from 751,000 in the 1980s to 865,000 in 1998. A similar elevation has been made for the fungi, from 47,000 to 69,000 species. A commonly cited total world figure in the late 1990s, suggested for example in the Global Biodiversity Assessment of the United Nations Environment Programme (1995), is 1.75 million species. But this does not take into account the number of formal species names that have been erroneously applied to species named by earlier investigators, requiring an eventual reduction of the global number by 10 or even 20 percent...
“Working figures” for all groups, including insects, have tended to fall close to 10 million; the Global Biodiversity Assessment number, which constitutes no more than an educated guess and leans to conservative sentiment, is 13,620,000."
Sorry, no, that's not how it works. We have to live with the consequences of our mistakes, as a species just as individuals.
The happy news is that we're not nearly so powerful, as a species, as we fantasize ourselves to be. No more than a million or so years after we're gone, you'd never be able to tell by looking that we were here at all.
You should be praying to science. Last time he decided to make a full wipe, that god made a single backup (!), put it on a boat made by an amateur and then even forgot about it. I would trust him my data as much as the next google storage product.
It's not as one-sided as all that, if you want to look at it that way. Who invented DDT? Who, not satisfied with having nearly wiped out the large raptors, then went on to make the same mistake but far worse with neonicotinoid pesticides, risking not "merely" worldwide trophic cascades, but the wholesale destruction of a critical participant in the food chain that permits humans to go on living at all?
Science is many things, and one of them is a not very clever child endlessly sticking a penny in a light socket and endlessly being surprised at the unpleasant result. The trouble is that we all participate in the unpleasant result.
even though the picture is not real, that's a truly beautiful creature! to be honest, i would personally prefer blue bees over yellow. there's just something about the color blue...
Why would you say that the picture is not real? That is a bold claim to make without any evidence, especially since you are incorrect. For anyone curious, image was originally published in the scientific journal ZooKeys. (https://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=2987)
The color is absolutely real. Many Hymenoptera, and other insects have this coloration. It structural, not pigment, bouncing light around via microscopic grooves and ridges. Fun fact, most Hymenoptera are also very very small, ~2mm or so, and some the chalcid, or jewel-wasps are very often iridescent.
Someone just pulled off this same effect with Chocolate a while back. [1] (NTY paywall]
Also liked and would recommend very highly Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (so many new things to know).
Leaving this comment here just in case someone is interested.