This is really "coming out is risky and scientific research needs to be cautious"! The process is so complicated that many taxonomists stop at "taking it back to the specimen room for archiving and preservation". Therefore, museums are often full of species that need to be identified and analyzed. Ironically, because of this, invertebrates other than fungi and insects have a shorter shelf life than animals, plants and insects-they are not easy to preserve, but they cannot be identified after a long time.
Relatively speaking, plant specimens are much more storable. Image source: Herbarium of National Botanical Garden, USA
Worried about cost performance
No matter how complicated the process is, it takes 2 1 year to publish a new species. This means that a taxonomist can only make three or four new species even if he is diligent and has a long life. There must be something fishy in this. Yes, there is another interesting finding in this study: the time spent by non-professional enthusiasts in the cupboard is much shorter than that of professional taxonomists, with an average of 15 years, which is a full third less.
This is because the current sci-tech journals and magazines do not pay much attention to publishing only one new species, and only journals with low impact factors are willing to publish. Therefore, professional researchers are not willing to do this loss-making business, but are more willing to devote their time to publishing high-impact articles. What's more, they often have a large number of collected samples piled up for analysis, including known species and unknown species, which is much more time-consuming and laborious than fans who only focus on a few samples at hand. Therefore, although it is exciting good news for taxonomists, it is not cost-effective for researchers.
Sorting out a large number of specimens is time-consuming and laborious. Image source @ showa-u.ac.jp
How much manpower is needed?
1985, the National Natural Science Foundation (NSF) estimated that there were about 8000~ 10000 taxonomists in North America. 1992 someone used this data to compare the number of new species discovered every year, and came to the conclusion that every 0.02~0.04 taxonomists can find a new invertebrate (mainly because of the diversity of insects and spiders), 0.9 can find a new amphibian and 0.3~0.4 can find a new fish. So aside from invertebrates with special circumstances, it is roughly estimated that the next taxonomist will find three or four new species in his life.
Moreover, in the case that about 30% taxonomists are botanists and 60% are zoologists, the number of new species released by the latter is still twice that of the former-of course, this data is mainly due to the relatively large number of new species discovered by insects and spiders.
Flora of China (80 volumes, 126 volumes, more than 50 million words) records 3 142 species of plants belonging to 3408 genera in 30 1 families in China, and is 3 12 authors and 164 in more than 80 scientific research and teaching units in China. Dear plant taxonomists, please cheer up and mourn ... Image source: ib.cas.cn.
Found that it couldn't keep up with extinction
At present, there are about150 ~1800,000 named species on the earth. According to the estimates of different scientists, the number of species in the world is different, ranging from 3 million to 80 million. How many species are there on the earth? It can be guessed that in the "sixth extinction", the speed of discovering new species was far behind the speed of species extinction. At this rate, I'm afraid all the species on the whole earth will be extinct before they are named.
Of course, taxonomic circles have also made a lot of efforts to solve this problem. For example, the International Zoological Nomenclature Committee has recently added regulations, and the online publication of new species has also been officially recognized. Unfortunately, it is speculated that this measure can only shorten the publication time of a new species by a few months at most.