Eduventure: The AR Edition - School Chat

So I had an odd question pop into my head:

"Is there a website that has a searchable list of every known species?"

Turns out, The answer is, Almost.

Of course there is also wikipedia, but the information is scattered and incomplete.

I find the IUCN website particularly helpful, having each species subdivided by endangered status. Apparently it holds about 50k+ species in it's informative database...though that's a far cry from the total 1.9 million known species.

The encylopedia of life (which is basically a pretty picture-filled wiki-like version of the ITIS) claims to have a much larger selection to peruse. 1.1 + million pages, though I'm not sure if each page represents an individual species. It doesn't have a browsable list of it's million plus pages. So it is hard to spotcheck. (of course, I'm not certain what I would do with a comprehensive list of nearly 2 million living things shoved in my face. Though a suppose a "random species" link would prove entertaining, if just for a cursory glance)

IUCN is pretty great - if someone's done the research for a given species and determined whether or not it's endangered. The site in general focuses on the various factors that quantify "how endangered" a species is, so if your species of interest hasn't had anyone doing that yet you're shit out of luck. Wikipedia also mostly works off the ICUN's listings when they mention in their infoboxes its conservation status.

Case in point: Gecarcoidea, an entire taxonomic family of terrestrial crabs. Six genera; at least two dozen species unless I miscounted. I can attest that one species is Threatened at least (Gecarcoidea natalis, the Christmas Island Red Crab), being rapidly killed off by an invasive ant species, and would probably go extinct without human intervention. Not a single species in the family has been assessed for how susceptible it is to climate decline or other events that make it eligible to be on the Red List.

Add to the fact that species aren't as discrete and fixed as those hard and fast rules you learnt at high school would suggest, and the whole thing just gets hell of a lot more complicated. Salamanders in the genus Ensatina are a ring species - where A can breed with B, B breeds with C, C with D and so on, but A can't breed with G. You could argue they're in the process of becoming different species, but strictly speaking the two populations can still share genetic information.

The internet's definitely made it less of a pain in the arse when entire families get renamed or tossed in a different taxa, because you can just make a myriad notes on the Encyclopedia of Life about what the organism used to be called. I partially suspect a lot of the renaming and reshuffling (which is all done to better-reflect which groups of animals had closer common ancestors, rather than "these things all look the same or do similar things") is because the internet's made it quicker to spread the word, although that's conjecture.

That last one's interesting because my mum brought me back a field guide to Japanese birds from her trip. My Japanese reading comprehension is shonky at the best of times, but each entry had a scientific name so I could google them for more information.

The Crested Kingfisher caught my eye, but I had some initial trouble hunting it down because its name was listed as Ceryle lugubris. Its name has been revised since. The book was published all of a year or two ago.