A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [184]
We don't look in the right places. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson describes how one botanist spent a few days tramping around ten hectares of jungle in Borneo and discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant—more than are found in the whole of North America. The plants weren't hard to find. It's just that no one had looked there before. Koen Maes of the Kenyan National Museum told me that he went to one cloud forest, as mountaintop forests are known in Kenya, and in a half hour “of not particularly dedicated looking” found four new species of millipedes, three representing new genera, and one new species of tree. “Big tree,” he added, and shaped his arms as if about to dance with a very large partner. Cloud forests are found on the tops of plateaus and have sometimes been isolated for millions of years. “They provide the ideal climate for biology and they have hardly been studied,” he said.
Overall, tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent of Earth's surface, but harbor more than half of its animal life and about two-thirds of its flowering plants, and most of this life remains unknown to us because too few researchers spend time in them. Not incidentally, much of this could be quite valuable. At least 99 percent of flowering plants have never been tested for their medicinal properties. Because they can't flee from predators, plants have had to contrive chemical defenses, and so are particularly enriched in intriguing compounds. Even now nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants, with another 16 percent coming from animals or microbes, so there is a serious risk with every hectare of forest felled of losing medically vital possibilities. Using a method called combinatorial chemistry, chemists can generate forty thousand compounds at a time in labs, but these products are random and not uncommonly useless, whereas any natural molecule will have already passed what the Economist calls “the ultimate screening programme: over three and a half billion years of evolution.”
Looking for the unknown isn't simply a matter of traveling to remote or distant places, however. In his book Life: An Unauthorised Biography, Richard Fortey notes how one ancient bacterium was found on the wall of a country pub “where men had urinated for generations”—a discovery that would seem to involve rare amounts of luck and devotion and possibly some other quality not specified.
There aren't enough specialists. The stock of things to be found, examined, and recorded very much outruns the supply of scientists available to do it. Take the hardy and little-known organisms known as bdelloid rotifers. These are microscopic animals that can survive almost anything. When conditions are tough, they curl up into a compact shape, switch off their metabolism, and wait for better times. In this state, you can drop them into boiling water or freeze them almost to absolute zero—that is the level where even atoms give up—and, when this torment has finished and they are returned to a more pleasing environment, they will uncurl and move on as if nothing has happened. So far, about 500 species have been identified (though other sources say 360), but nobody has any idea, even remotely, how many there may be altogether. For years almost all that was known about them was thanks to the work of a devoted amateur, a London clerical worker named David Bryce who studied them in his spare time. They can be found all over the world, but you could have all the bdelloid rotifer experts in the world to dinner and not have to borrow plates from the neighbors.
Even something as important and ubiquitous as fungi—and fungi are both—attracts comparatively little notice. Fungi are everywhere and come in many forms—as mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, to name but a sampling—and they exist in volumes