Describing the undiscovered

Abstract

Describing the UndiscoveredOver 1.7 million species have been described; approximately one million (60%) of these species are insects (Roskov et al. 2018). That's remarkable diversity (and an impressive amount of work completed by insect taxonomists!). But again, these numbers represent only the described species. As we know, there are many, many more species awaiting description. When considering all species on earth, some of the most recent estimates indicate that there could be somewhere between 8.7 million (Mora et al. 2011) or even up to 6 BILLION species, if symbionts and cryptic species are considered (Larsen et al. 2017). When considering insect richness alone, estimates indicate that approximately 6 million species exist (e.g. Basset et al. 2012, Stork et al. 2015). If we narrow down our scope further, and just consider the Chironomidae, we have not yet described half of the projected 15,000 species (Armitage et al. 1995) that exist worldwide. No matter how you look at it, there are an incredible number of organisms that we know virtually nothing about.