Question:

How many species exist that we know of?

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There are millions of species out there, btu how many exactly? Also include plant life, micro-organisms etc. Thanks.

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  1. you know what? no ordinary people that is not part of the scientific community can have this info. Also, these Millions of species keep on either decreasing (extinction) or increasing (discovery)


  2. It's an unanswerable question because there isn't really good agreement about what 'species' actually means, let alone the fact that new ones are found and old ones die out all the time.

    Look: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

  3. One important factor in even coming close to an estimate is the number of species of bacteria.  This number is certainly much greater than the sum of all of the other species combined.

    Craig Venter, who lead one of the groups that produced the description of the human genome, tried an interesting experiment.  He outfitted his pleasure boat as a lab for gene sequencing.  He sailed from New England, through the Atlantic and ended up near South America.  He sampled the water every 200 miles.  He found that there were over 80% new bacteria in every sample.  That means that the earth is populated by hundreds of millions if not billions of bacterial species.

  4. i studied ecology so i have loads of info on this.

    On the sheet in front of me the known existing species  are:

    bacteria 4000

    protoctista 80000

    Animalia----

    vertabrates total 52000

    Mammals 4630

    birds 9946

    reptiles 7400

    amphibians 4950

    fish 25000

    Insects and myraphoids 963000

    arachnids 75000

    molluscs 70000

    crustaceans 40000

    nematodes 25000

    Fungi 72000

    plantae 270000

    Across all of the five kingdoms there are 1750000

    However it is estimated that if all were discovered there would be 14000000 species!!!

    Sorry its a bit of a mouthful!!!

  5. Wherever you look they will have a different estimation. In fact somewhere I read that scientists know more about how many stars are in the universe than how many species are on earth.

    Estimations have varied between 5 million to 100 million. It's most likely to be around 12 million.

    This number constantly changes, for example, each year 3 new bird species are found. Furthermore a study of a tree niche had shown that out of 1,200 insects on the tree, 80% of them were undiscovered.

  6. 98 651

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