ASK AN EXPERT Another day, another species

MOST people think finding a species previously unknown to science is very unusual.

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret … it isn’t.

In Australia it’s an everyday event.

Australia is biologically megadiverse, meaning we have a lot of species, and most of them are found nowhere else on Earth.

We are also economically developed, and so we are well equipped to study our species and do the work required to describe and name them.

I study plants, and we are still describing new plant species at a cracking rate.

Australia is a world leader in this.

In the past 10 years, more than 1500 species of plants were named in Australia — that’s 150 every year on average, with only Brazil, home of the Amazon rainforest, pipping us at more than 200 a year.

Plants are one of the most intensively studied groups of life, and we have a good estimate of the number of species in Australia: about 25,000.

More than 90 per cent of those have been named.

But other groups have not enjoyed the same attention, such as fungi, and insects.

These organisms may be much less conspicuous but no less important, for example as decomposers or pollinators, and often as agents of disease! Yet, of the estimated 100,000 species of fungi, less than a quarter have been named.

It’s worse for insects, the largest group of life with more than 200,000 species.

Only about a third have been named — just 130,000 to go!

By contrast, all of Australia’s birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians together total only about 3000 species, with just a small handful yet to discover.

From a biodiversity perspective, the world is ruled by the little things.

Naming species is all in a day’s work, and there is much more work to do.