Cost of Identifying Every Animal Species

Antonio Marques and Fernando Carbayo, two biologists from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, estimated that the cost of discovering, naming, and scientifically describing the remaining animals on Earth would cost nearly $263 billion. This number is strictly an estimate for animal species, and does not account for other life forms. In order to come up with this number, Marques, a jellyfish specialist, and Carbavo, a flatworm expert, surveyed 44 Brazilian taxonomists to determine their rate of describing new animal species. This rate took into account their education, lifetime salaries, laboratory equipment, and expeditions. They estimated that there were an estimated 5.4 million animal species that are yet to be discovered.

These biologists, along with the rest of the science community, feel that it is urgent to discover these animals, considering their role in crop pollination, clean air, along with other aspects of human well being. However, the global shortage of taxonomists is a huge obstacle that is difficult to overcome. On average, taxonomists are identifying and cataloging nearly 16,000 new animal species per year. At this rate, it will take about 360 years to complete this task.

As technological advancements in areas such as image matching software, electronic publishing, and photography are being developed, costs are slowly declining. These advancements could potentially reduce costs and speed up the process of identifying species.

I chose this article simply because I was interested in the final cost that the scientists came up with, in addition to what they took into account when calculating this cost. I do agree with the notion that it would be beneficial to document all the existing species of global biodiversity as soon as we can. Knowing about the various life forms around us and understanding how they impact our daily activities is invaluable knowledge. In order to complete the job of identifying every single species of organisms, I feel that it would be advantageous to have IT savvy individuals who could work on the technological side of things. Although this would require intensive training, it would allow taxonomists to focus on the technical identification of these organisms; it would also create more jobs and potentially reduce the costs of identifying foreign species.

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/03/how-much-would-it-cost-to-identi.html?ref=hp