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Wednesday, August 24, 2011 www.metronews.ca News worth sharing.
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Critter count vaults upward
Lovable. Mac
Up-to-date ‘census’ puts number of species on planet at 8.7 million Likely that vast majority of creatures remain unrecorded
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John McDonald takes off after hitting a solo home run in a recent game against the Boston Red Sox at the Rogers Centre. LUCAS OLENIUK/TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
Farewell fan favourite
John McDonald and one-time all-star second baseman Aaron Hill have been shipped to the Arizona Diamondbacks for second baseman Kelly Johnson, Toronto general manager Alex Anthopoulos announced yesterday. See story, page 33.
Census summer students do not show up on the ocean floor to politely remind mysterious soft-shelled creatures that they haven’t been documented yet. That’s why it’s difficult to know how many species crawl, squirm and fly among us. Since a formal system was created in 1758, 1.25 million species have been recorded and entered into the official record. Since then, the best guesses scientists have made about all the ones we’ve missed, is, oh, anywhere between three million and 100 million. Not very helpful. But yesterday, a group of scientists from the Census of Marine Life published a study in Biology, a Public Library of Science journal, narrowing the gap a tad and giving the most precise validated estimate yet: 8.7 million, give or take 1.3 million. Based on the scientists’ calcu-
“The water we drink, the air we breathe, the soil we grow crops in, are all maintained by species. It’s an infinitesimally complex machine … with 8.7 million parts.” STUDY CO-AUTHOR BORIS WORM
lations, 86 per cent of species on land and 91 per cent of those in the sea have not been discovered, described or recorded yet. “I have a world map in my office and I’m looking at it right now,” said study co-author Boris Worm, a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University. “Where are they hiding?” Worm actually has a pretty good idea: the wet tropics and rare forests of Indonesia, South America and Africa, and the ocean between Japan and Aus-
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The lion-tailed macaque ranks among the rarest primates.
tralia, which is known to be species-rich. Already, Worm said, close to 60,000 of the earth’s recorded species are being monitored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and 20,000, including the Motagua Spiny-tailed Iguana and the liontailed macaque, are classified as threatened. TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
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