Yesterday, a friend sent me this press release from the AMNH. I thought
some of you might be interested. He sent it with a note: "Your job just
got a LOT harder..."
Ardith Bondi
December 2016
NEW STUDY DOUBLES THE ESTIMATE OF BIRD SPECIES IN THE WORLD
NUMBER OF AVIAN SPECIES SOARS TO 18,000
New research led by the American Museum of Natural History suggests that
there are about 18,000 bird species in the world—nearly twice as many as
previously thought. The work focuses on “hidden” avian diversity—birds
that look similar to one another, or were thought to interbreed, but are
actually different species. Recently published in the journal PLOS ONE,
the study has serious implications for conservation practices.
“We are proposing a major change to how we count diversity,” said Joel
Cracraft, an author of the study and a curator in the American Museum of
Natural History’s Department of Ornithology. “This new number says that
we haven’t been counting and conserving species in the ways we want.”
Birds are traditionally thought of as a well-studied group, with more
than 95 percent of their global species diversity estimated to have been
described. Most checklists used by bird watchers as well as by
scientists say that there are roughly between 9,000 and 10,000 species
of birds. But those numbers are based on what’s known as the “biological
species concept,” which defines species in terms of what animals can
breed together.
“It’s really an outdated point of view, and it’s a concept that is
hardly used in taxonomy outside of birds,” said lead author George
Barrowclough, an associate curator in the Museum’s Department of
Ornithology.
For the new work, Cracraft, Barrowclough, and their colleagues at the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the University of Washington
examined a random sample of 200 bird species through the lens of
morphology—the study of the physical characteristics like plumage
pattern and color, which can be used to highlight birds with separate
evolutionary histories. This method turned up, on average, nearly two
different species for each of the 200 birds studied. This suggests that
bird biodiversity is severely underestimated, and is likely closer to
18,000 species worldwide.
The researchers also surveyed existing genetic studies of birds, which
revealed that there could be upwards of 20,000 species. But because the
birds in this body of work were not selected randomly—and, in fact, many
were likely chosen for study because they were already thought to have
interesting genetic variation—this could be an overestimate. The authors
argue that future taxonomy efforts in ornithology should be based on
both methods.
“It was not our intent to propose new names for each of the more than
600 new species we identified in the research sample,” Cracraft said.
“However, our study provides a glimpse of what a future taxonomy should
encompass.”
Increasing the number of species has implications for preserving
biodiversity and other conservation efforts.
“We have decided societally that the target for conservation is the
species,” said Robert Zink, a co-author of the study and a biologist at
the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “So it follows then that we really
need to be clear about what a species is, how many there are, and where
they’re found.”
John Klicka, from the University of Washington, Seattle, also was a
co-author on this study.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation,
grant #s 1241066 and 1146423.
PLOS ONE paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166307
American Museum of Natural History (amnh.org)
The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the
world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions.
The Museum encompasses 45 permanent exhibition halls, including the Rose
Center for Earth and Space and the Hayden Planetarium, as well as
galleries for temporary exhibitions. It is home to the Theodore
Roosevelt Memorial, New York State’s official memorial to its 33rd
governor and the nation’s 26th president, and a tribute to Roosevelt’s
enduring legacy of conservation. The Museum’s five active research
divisions and three cross-disciplinary centers support approximately 200
scientists, whose work draws on a world-class permanent collection of
more than 33 million specimens and artifacts, as well as specialized
collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, and
one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its
Richard Gilder Graduate School, it is the only American museum
authorized to grant the Ph.D. degree and the Master of Arts in Teaching
degree. Annual attendance has grown to approximately 5 million, and the
Museum’s exhibitions and Space Shows can be seen in venues on five
continents. The Museum’s website and collection of apps for mobile
devices extend its collections, exhibitions, and educational programs to
millions more beyond its walls. Visit amnh.org for more information.
Follow
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No. 113
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