Don't Know Much About (Earth) Biology

People assume that scientists know a lot more about the diversity of life on earth than they actually do.  The reality is that there are still parts of the world where scientists know very little about the local plants and animals.  In some tropical areas we'll never know that certain species of plants and animals even existed.  They'll be destroyed by deforestation or other human activities before scientists ever catalog them.

 How can we know so little about Earth when we've sent men to the moon and robots to Mars?  Well, there are still places in the world that are very difficult for an outsider to get to.  In many cases there doesn't seem to be any reason to get there.  Some areas have no roads.  Others have ongoing civil wars that have lasted for fifty or sixty years or more.  It is simply too dangerous to go there.

In those areas, most of the large or spectacular animals are known.  Smaller ones are not, and  there are still a lot of them to be discovered. Scientists started taking note of that in the 90's.  In July 1995, a biologist took a two week trip to the Columbian Andes and came back with six new species of small mammals. An article in the September 13, 1996 issue of the prestigious journal SCIENCE claimed that at that time there were a little over 4600 species of mammals known to western science. The article estimated that number would jump by at least 15% when all of the new mammals that had been found in the last decade were officially named and described. The article quotes Lawrence R. Heaney, an evolutionary biogeographer at Chicago's Field Museum as saying that he thought the number of mammal species would eventually reach 8000.   In other words at that point we probably only knew about a little over half of the living mammal species.  Heaney said, "The tropics are still so poorly known, even for mammals that just about anywhere you go, you'll find something new." Heaney himself found 11 species of small mammals in the Philippines in the early 90s.

Most of the new animals are small--rats, bats and shrews. A few of them are big. Several large new animals in the cow/goat/deer tribe turned up in Vietnam and Laos in the last ten to fifteen years.  There are still more large, undiscovered animals out there.  A monitor lizard almost as big as a Komodo Dragon has been seen by reputable and trained observers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, but not captured yet. New species of monkeys still turn up in Brazil at the rate of about one per year.

Our lack of knowledge isn't just at the level of not knowing about the existence of species.  Even when a species is catalogued it is often known only by a 'type specimen'--skin and some bones in a museum somewhere.  The behavior and ecology of even relatively large and spectacular animals is often almost unknown.  For example, the Sun Bear, a small tropical bear in Asia, is almost totally unknown in terms of behavior in the wild.  That's starting to change, but given the rapid deforestation in the area, they may be extinct in the wild before they are properly studied.  In the case of the Sun Bear that's particularly sad, because there may well be something important to be learned.  Sun Bears have very large and well-developed brains for their sizes.  Their bodies are in the same size range as an Orang Utan, and they have brains that are almost exactly the same size.  It would be fascinating to find out why that is--how that big brain gets used, but we may never get the chance.

There is a lot still to be learned about what kinds of life exist on the earth, and how it exists.  Unfortunately, we're running out of time to learn those things, and to me that's a real tragedy.