A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [183]
In an attempt to haul things into the modern age, in 2001 Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, launched an enterprise called the All Species Foundation with the aim of finding every living organism and recording it on a database. The cost of such an exercise has been estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to as much as $50 billion. As of the spring of 2002, the foundation had just $1.2 million in funds and four full-time employees. If, as the numbers suggest, we have perhaps 100 million species of insects yet to find, and if our rates of discovery continue at the present pace, we should have a definitive total for insects in a little over fifteen thousand years. The rest of the animal kingdom may take a little longer.
So why do we know as little as we do? There are nearly as many reasons as there are animals left to count, but here are a few of the principal causes:
Most living things are small and easily overlooked. In practical terms, this is not always a bad thing. You might not slumber quite so contentedly if you were aware that your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites, which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes of skin that you shed as you doze and toss. Your pillow alone may be home to forty thousand of them. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon.) And don't think a clean pillowcase will make a difference. To something on the scale of bed mites, the weave of the tightest human fabric looks like ship's rigging. Indeed, if your pillow is six years old—which is apparently about the average age for a pillow—it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of “sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung,” to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Center. (But at least they are your mites. Think of what you snuggle up with each time you climb into a motel bed.)*38 These mites have been with us since time immemorial, but they weren't discovered until 1965.
If creatures as intimately associated with us as bed mites escaped our notice until the age of color television, it's hardly surprising that most of the rest of the small-scale world is barely known to us. Go out into a woods—any woods at all—bend down and scoop up a handful of soil, and you will be holding up to 10 billion bacteria, most of them unknown to science. Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts, some 200,000 hairy little fungi known as molds, perhaps 10,000 protozoans (of which the most familiar is the amoeba), and assorted rotifers, flatworms, roundworms, and other microscopic creatures known collectively as cryptozoa. A large portion of these will also be unknown.
The most comprehensive handbook of microorganisms, Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, lists about 4,000 types of bacteria. In the 1980s, a pair of Norwegian scientists, Jostein Goksøyr and Vigdis Torsvik, collected a gram of random soil from a beech forest near their lab in Bergen and carefully analyzed its bacterial content. They found that this single small sample contained between 4,000 and 5,000 separate bacterial species, more than in the whole of Bergey's Manual. They then traveled to a coastal location a few miles away, scooped up another gram of earth, and found that it contained 4,000 to 5,000 other species. As Edward O. Wilson observes: “If over 9,000