The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| How many species on Earth? 8.7 million give or take Posted: 24 Aug 2011 11:38 PM PDT SINGAPORE, Aug 25 — Scientists have yet to discover, or classify, about 90 per cent of the plant and animal species on Earth, which is estimated to be home to just under nine million species, a study says. The study, published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology yesterday, vastly increases the estimated richness of life on the planet. More than 1.2 million species have been formally described and named so far.  A bug crawls on a leaf at Sundarijal Nagarjun National Park, northeast of Nepal's capital Kathmandu on July 24, 2011. Scientists have yet to classify many species on Earth. — Reuters pic The quest is no mere scientific fancy. Humans derive huge benefits from the richness of life on the planet, from foods to medicines, to clean air and water. Knowing how many species there are and taking steps to ramp up the search and description could lead to more discoveries that benefit mankind. The recent surge in extinction rates only made the quest more urgent, the scientists said. "With the clock of extinction now ticking faster for many species, I believe speeding the inventory of Earth's species merits high scientific and societal priority," said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who led the study. Some UN studies say the world is facing the worst losses since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago. Species are classified according to a 250-year-old taxonomy system. This groups life into a pyramid-like hierarchy, with species at the base, then genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom and domain. Mora and team studied existing species databases and taxonomic data. They wanted to see if there were numerical patterns in the rankings, working on the assumption the higher taxonomic categories, meaning those at the top of the pyramid, are much more completely described than those as the bottom. They examined well-known groups and found the relative numbers of species assigned to phylum, class, order, family and genus follow consistent patterns. Applying this pattern to less well-studied groups could yield a reasonable estimate of total species numbers. The result was 6.5 million species on land and 2.2 million in the ocean depths. The study had an error margin of 1.3 million in total. The results suggested 86 per cent of existing species on land and 91 per cent of species in the ocean still await description, the scientists concluded. "The diversity of life is one of the most striking aspects of our planet," the scientists say in the study. "Hence knowing how many species inhabit Earth is among the most fundamental questions in science. Yet the answer to this question remains enigmatic." Writing in an accompanying commentary to the research, Robert May of the Zoology Department at Oxford University lamented the rapid rate of species loss, due to land clearing, pollution, climate change and other factors. "It is a remarkable testament to humanity's narcissism that we know the number of books in the US Library of Congress on February 1, 2011 was 22,194,656," wrote May, until recently the president of The Royal Society. But it was remarkable that science "cannot tell you to within an order-of-magnitude how many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with," he added. — Reuters |
| Basketball helped Lithuanians survive Soviet gulag Posted: 24 Aug 2011 11:16 PM PDT VILNIUS, Aug 25 — Forced labour camps were meant to crush opponents to the regime of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but basketball helped them to survive, an exhibition in former Soviet state Lithuania shows. Around 150,000 Lithuanians were sent to the camps, known as gulags after their Russian acronym, and another 132,000 were deported to live in far-flung parts of the former Soviet empire by 1953. About 50,000 perished due to lack of food, illness, harsh weather and hard labour.  Visitor Algis Tomas Geniusas points to pictures of Soviet gulag labour camp basketball teams during an exhibition in Vilnius on August 24, 2011. — Reuters pic The show opened yesterday at the former headquarters of the feared KGB secret police, which is now a museum, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. The exhibition has been timed to coincide with Lithuania's hosting of the European basketball championships, which begin at the end of August. Pictures displayed on a green wooden wall with a basketball board and a barbed-wire fence on top depict political prisoners and deportees playing basketball or proudly showing their team jerseys with Lithuanian names, such as Zalgiris, now a famous club from Kaunas, Lithuania's second largest city. Some pictures captured fans absorbed by the game and cheering their side, and who, it seems, had forgotten for a moment about their hardships. "To be able to play basketball at the gulag allowed us to feel human again, not only like a slave, and to survive the captivity," Juozas Butrimas, 84, told Reuters at the exhibition. He said he was arrested by the KGB and sent to a forced labour camp in Russia's coal mining region of Vorkuta above the Arctic Circle in 1945 for being a member of an underground anti-Soviet organisation. Butrimas happened to play basketball at a local team in the town of Panevezys before the KGB arrested him and three other teammates. Two of them never returned, while Butrimas came back to Lithuania 21 years later. Lithuania this year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Soviet deportations after the Baltic state was occupied by former Soviet forces under a secret pact with Nazi Germany. Basketball became popular in Lithuania after the small Baltic country won the European basketball championships in 1937 and 1939, when it also hosted the championship. It will again host the European championship on August 31-September 18, a fact which inspired the runners of the KGB museum to make an exhibition of archive pictures and documents on basketball as a means of survival in the Soviet labour camps. The first basketball teams appeared in the early 1950s, but they sprang up across the labour camps after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's death in 1953, when restrictions were eased, Juozeviciute said. Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians and others also teamed up and played the sport in the camps. "Basketball means so much to me, and I am so proud that we are having this championship here," said Butrimas. — Reuters |
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