Study shows hundreds of new mammal species are hiding in plain sight

According to study co-author Brian Carstens, a professor of evolution, ecology and biology at Ohio State University, most of these unidentified mammals are small and so similar to well-known animals that biologists are unable to identify them as one. are not capable. different creatures, This has deterred scientists from discovering the existence of these mammals.

“When you’re looking at a small animal that weighs 10 grams, it’s hard to notice small, subtle differences in appearance,” Carstens said.

“Unless you do a genetic analysis, you can’t tell that they are different species,” the researcher said.

The study, titled “Analysis of Biodiversity Data Shows Mammal Species Hiding in Predictable Locations” was published March 28, 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The team, led by Daniel Parsons of Ohio State, used supercomputer and machine-learning techniques to examine millions of publicly available gene sequences from 4,310 different mammal species, as well as to obtain information about the animals’ locations, their environments, their life histories and done with Other relevant details.

As a result, they were able to build a predictive model to determine which taxa. mammals Most likely to include hidden species.

“Based on our analysis, a conservative estimate would be that there are hundreds of species of mammals around the world that have yet to be identified,” Carsten said.

The discovery in itself would not be surprising to biologists, he said. Only an estimated 1 to 10% of Earth’s species have been formally described by researchers.

“What we did was new, predict where these new species were most likely to be found,” Carsten said.

The findings indicated that the unknown species is often found in families of small-bodied animals, including bats and rodents.

The researchers’ model also suggested that species with wider geographic ranges and greater climate variability would have the most elusive species.

It is also likely that many of the elusive species will be found in tropical rain forests, which is not surprising given that most mammal species are found there.

Carstens stressed that several unnamed species also probably exist in the United States. His lab has named a few of them. For example, a paper from 2018 by Carstens and his former graduate student Ariana Morales demonstrated that the small brown bat, which is widespread throughout North America, actually consists of five different species.

That study also highlighted an important aspect of why it is important to recognize new species. One of the recently discovered bat species had a very small home range that was confined to the area around the Great Basin in Nevada, making its protection even more important.

“This knowledge is important to people who are doing conservation work. We can’t protect a species if we don’t know it exists. As soon as we name a few as a species, it’s a lot of things.” Legal and matters in other ways,” Carsten said.

Carsten calculates that about 80% of the mammal species in the world have been identified based on the findings of this study.

He said that when compared to beetles, ants or other types of animals, mammals are surprisingly well described. “We know a lot more about mammals than many other animals because they grow up and are more closely related to humans, which makes them more interesting to us.”

(with inputs from ANI)