The process of discovering new species is not as simple as one might think.

There is no plot in the movie where a botanist pulls up a blade of grass in a deep mountain forest and shouts ecstatically, "I have discovered a new species!"

In most cases, scientists first have to take them back to museums or herbariums and archive them as "suspected new species"; then they must search massive amounts of literature in detail to ensure that no one has discovered this species before; and then they have to travel to different places.

We need to go somewhere to check and compare similar species that have been recorded, and even do some DNA analysis to determine the identity of this "suspected new species" and its relationship with other species; finally, after confirming all this, we can sit down and write an article.

Latin description (revised to English description in 2012 will do), new species published.

The time lost is the "cupboard time" of each species.

This is really "coming out is risky, scientific research needs to be cautious"!

The process is so tedious that many taxonomists stop at "bringing it back to the herbarium and archiving it."

Therefore, museums are often filled with species that need to be identified and analyzed.

Funnily enough, for this very reason, fungi and invertebrates other than insects have a shorter shelf life than plants, animals and insects - they are not easy to preserve and cannot be identified if left for a long time.

Relatively speaking, plant specimens are much more durable.

Image source: U.S. National Arboretum Herbarium has a worrying price/performance ratio. No matter how cumbersome the process is, it is still too much to take 21 years to publish a new species.

This means that even if a taxonomist is diligent and lives a long life, he can only discover 3 or 4 new species.

There must be something fishy here.

Yes, there is another interesting finding in this study: non-professional hobbyists spend much less time in cabinets than professional taxonomists, an average of 15 years, a full third less.

This is because today's scientific journals no longer value publishing just a new species, and only journals with a low impact factor are willing to publish it.

Therefore, professional scientific researchers are not willing to engage in this loss-making business, but are more willing to invest their time in work that can publish high-impact factor articles.

What's more, they often have a large number of collected samples waiting for analysis, including known species and unknown species. Compared with enthusiasts who only focus on the few samples they have on hand, processing is much more time-consuming and laborious.

Therefore, although the discovery of new species is exciting news in the eyes of taxonomy enthusiasts, it is not a cost-effective job in the eyes of scientific researchers.

Organizing a large number of specimens is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Image source @showa-u.ac.jp How much manpower is needed?

In 1985, the National Natural Science Foundation (NSF) estimated that there were approximately 8,000 to 10,000 taxonomists in North America at that time.

In 1992, someone used this data to compare the number of new species discovered each year, and concluded that on average, every 0.02 to 0.04 taxonomists could discover a new invertebrate (mainly because of the wide variety of insects and spiders), and 0.9

A new amphibian can be discovered, and 0.3~0.4 people can discover a new fish.

So leaving aside the special situation of invertebrates, it is roughly estimated that the next taxonomist will discover 3 or 4 new species in his lifetime.

Moreover, when about 30% of taxonomists are botanists and 60% are zoologists, the number of new species discovered by the latter is still twice that of the former - of course, this data is mainly due to insects and spiders.

Relatively many new species have been discovered.

"Flora of China" has 80 volumes, 126 volumes, and more than 50 million words. It records 31,142 species of plants in 3,408 genera and 301 families in my country. It has been accumulated by 312 authors and 164 cartographers from more than 80 scientific research and teaching units across the country over 80 years of work and 45 years of work. It took years of hard work to complete.

——Dear plant taxonomists, please cheer and express your condolences... Picture source: ib.cas.cn It is found that we cannot keep up with extinction. Now, there are about 1.5 to 1.8 million named and species species on the earth.

The number of species in the world varies according to different estimates by different scientists, ranging from 3 to 80 million.

(How many species are there on the earth?) As you can guess, in the "sixth mass extinction" of species, the speed of discovering new species cannot keep up with the speed of species extinction.

At this rate, all species on the planet may be extinct long before they can be named.

Of course, the taxonomy community has also made a lot of efforts to solve this problem. For example, the International Committee on Nomenclature of Zoological Terminology recently added new regulations, and the online publication of new species has also been officially recognized.

Unfortunately, it is speculated that this initiative will only shorten the time to publish a new species by a few months.