2025-12-22 アリゾナ大学
<関連情報>
- https://news.arizona.edu/news/new-species-are-now-being-discovered-faster-ever-study-suggests
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3071
- https://medibio.tiisys.com/167202/
- https://academic.oup.com/sysbio/article/72/2/391/6775868?login=false
既知の生物多様性の過去と未来:新種の出現率、パターン、予測の経時変化 The past and future of known biodiversity: Rates, patterns, and projections of new species over time
Xin Li, Ding Yang, Liang Wang, and John J. Wiens
Science Advances Published:5 Dec 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz3071
Abstract
Our understanding of biodiversity patterns comes primarily from described species. Here, we analyze how known biodiversity has increased across living organisms. Past research suggested that the number of new species per year peaked near 1900 and that only ~2 million species exist. We find that overall rates of species descriptions have recently accelerated, with the largest numbers of new species per year all in the past ~20 years (2000 to 2020). The largest groups grew the most quickly during this period, including animals, arthropods, insects, and beetles. However, long-term trends in rates of species descriptions were often unrelated to recent rates and current richness. For example, rates for fungi have recently increased, whereas rates for insects have not. Extrapolating these rates of species descriptions into the future requires considerable caution. Nevertheless, some intriguing patterns are suggested, such as unexpectedly high projected species numbers of plants, fungi, arachnids, malacostracan crustaceans, ray-finned fishes, and amphibians.
地球規模の生物多様性の推定:隠蔽昆虫種の役割 Estimating Global Biodiversity: The Role of Cryptic Insect Species
Xin Li ,John J Wiens
Systematic Biology Published:27 October 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syac069
Abstract
How many species are there on Earth and to what groups do these species belong? These fundamental questions span systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Yet, recent estimates of overall global biodiversity have ranged wildly, from the low millions to the trillions. Insects are a pivotal group for these estimates. Insects make up roughly half of currently described extant species (across all groups), with ~1 million described species. Insect diversity is also crucial because many other taxa have species that may be unique to each insect host species, including bacteria, apicomplexan protists, microsporidian fungi, nematodes, and mites. Several projections of total insect diversity (described and undescribed) have converged on ~6 million species. However, these projections have not incorporated the morphologically cryptic species revealed by molecular data. Here, we estimate the extent of cryptic insect diversity. We perform a systematic review of studies that used explicit species-delimitation methods with multilocus data. We estimate that each morphology-based insect species contains (on average) 3.1 cryptic species. We then use these estimates to project the overall number of species on Earth and their distribution among major groups. Our estimates suggest that overall global biodiversity may range from 563 million to 2.2 billion species. [Biodiversity; cryptic species; insects; species delimitation; species richness.]
