As biodiversity declines, researchers race to name millions of species unknown to science
Of an estimated 10 million species on the planet only two million have been named by science
In a time of unprecedented biodiversity loss — what's in a name?
In 2023 scientists announced a startling discovery in the Pacific Ocean — in a site proposed for deepsea mining, the seafloor was not a barren wasteland, but a rich underwater garden, bustling with life.
The discovery of thousands of species unknown to science raised concerns about unintended impacts, but it also highlighted an unsettling fact about our relationship with the natural world: 86 per cent of land species and 91 per cent of marine species remain undiscovered.
There's an estimated 10 million species on the planet, though some estimates put the number much higher. Only about two million have been named by science.
With growing threats to the world's biodiversity scientists fear we're running out of time to classify the life around us — with unknown consequences for people, and the planet.
"I just don't think you can [be] fully… empathetic to the plight of species that you don't know, that are just sort of abstract concepts out there or numbers," said American entomologist and taxonomist Quentin Wheeler.
"Until we've actually seen them and observed them and described what makes them unique among all the millions of living things… it's very difficult to fully appreciate what we're on the verge of losing."
The evolution of taxonomy
The sorting of the natural world goes back to ancient times, though it developed into our scientific system of classification with the work of the 18th-century Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus.
There's also evidence that categorization is a deeply held human impulse. People with damage to their temporal lobe struggle to recognize and classify living things, suggesting that the taxonomic impulse is rooted in our physiology.
Meanwhile, acquiring the ability to categorize is a core step in infant development, and classifications for the natural world share similarities across cultures.
Taxonomy as developed by Linnaeus is the science of naming, describing, and classifying groups of organisms based on shared characteristics. It revolutionized the science of classification, creating a system that aimed to classify all life, as well as a two-part naming system for species, called binomial nomenclature, that's still in use today.
But Linnaeus' system has also been criticized for its limitations, from its implicit and sometimes explicit connections to racist ideology, to its inability to account for evolution. He believed that all species were created in their current form by God, and that nature reflected a divine plan.
"The basic assumption that Linnaeus brought to organizing the natural world was that all of nature was a noun, and by that I mean that he believed that it was a static creation," said Jason Roberts, author of Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life.
"But as we understand, the concept of evolution was controversial even in Darwin's day, you can imagine how controversial it was a century earlier."
A decline in expertise
In the 20th century taxonomy has evolved offering new ways to trace the branching of life bringing about some surprising conclusions. For instance, in modern taxonomy, Linnaeus' class for fish is no longer used, since there's no common ancestor that includes all the fish in the water. And birds have since been grouped in with reptiles — they're most closely related to crocodiles.
These advancements have created a taxonomic system based squarely on the science of evolution. Yet taxonomy as a science is dying.
In a 2023 study published in the journal Diversity, researchers noted that the field had been in decline for generations, leading to a loss of taxonomic expertise at a time of increasing biodiversity loss.
"There are a number of major natural history museums that have half as many taxonomists on staff now as a generation ago — some of them even fewer, which is really alarming," said Wheeler.
Scientists say restoring the prestige and the funding for taxonomic work is an essential part of stemming this decline.t also serves a practical purpose, helping ensure that researchers can communicate about species more easily for conservation purposes.
'A reflection of who you are'
But scientific classification is not the only form of classifying life.
In Ontario three friends are working on a guide to bird names in Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe, the Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region of North America.
While the project started to figure out which Anishinaabe names apply to which species — so far, they've documented more than 170 — it's grown into something much bigger, said creator Joseph Pitawanakwat.
"All we wanted was to be able to know which name belongs to which bird. But you end up uncovering and unlocking so many incredible opportunities and avenues along the way."
One of those avenues has been the Anishinaabe taxonomy that Pitawanakwat, along with collaborators Andrés Jiménez Monge and Junaid Shahzad Khan, have begun to explore.
The Anishinaabe system weaves life together with a series of linguistic threads.
"That grouping will…not necessarily be based on similar physical characteristics or evolutionary closeness," said Jiménez Monge. "If you start decomposing the names and which other parts the names have, then you start understanding that these are not boxes. These are threads."
These threads fully entwine humans in the web of nature. Within one animal's name, like that of the common raven, there could be references to a certain tree, to other animals that rely on that tree, to the human body part (the uvula) required to imitate the raven's call.
Pitawanakwat said on a guided walk, one participant reflected that the Anishinaabemowin language connected humans to other species.
"She said…to be able to go outside and wander through the natural world and….if she was using our language, there would be no way that she could separate herself from everything that she was describing," Pitawanakwat said.
"It's like everything that you speak of when you're out there is a reflection of who you are. And so you… cannot even begin to define yourself without having a fair and full understanding of everything that's around you outside."
Jiménez Monge said this isn't about replacing one system of classification with another. Instead, there's value in exploring all forms of knowledge.
And as the world's biodiversity is under increasing threat — with some scenarios estimating that up to a third of species are at risk of going extinct — naming, in all its forms, can help our beautiful, fragile world endure.
"It's too easy to just have kind of a green backdrop to our lives and not really care whether it's made of a large number of species or just a handful," said Wheeler.
"The more we learn about species and their morphology and their geography and their natural history, the more likely we are to value them and to make some of the sacrifices that humans will have to make to leave enough room on the planet for them to survive too."
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*This episode was produced by Moira Donovan and Mary Lynk.
Guests in this episode:
Jason Roberts is the author of Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life.
Michael Ohl is a biologist and Head of Entomological Collections at the Natural History Museum of Berlin
Joseph Pitawanakwat, Andrés Jiménez Monge and Junaid Shahzad Khan are working on the Anishinaabemowin bird names project.
Quentin Wheeler is an American entomologist and taxonomist.
A special thank you to Gregory Murphy, professor emeritus of psychology at New York University, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi, presidential professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.
