Biodiversity loss is a threat to our survival and identifying previously unknown species is an important first step towards conservation.

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Naming Life Before It Disappears: How Identifying Newly Discovered Species Can Conserve Nature and Save Humanity Biodiversity loss is a threat to our survival and identifying previously unknown species is an important first step towards conservation. Richard Matthews Jan 12   READ IN APP   Subscribed Biodiversity loss is a threat to our survival and identifying previously unknown species is an important first step towards conservation. We are finding undiscovered plants and animals with increasing frequency, but as we uncover new species, countless others are being lost forever. According to a recently published study in Science Advances, an average of 16,000 unknown life forms are being described every year, and 15 percent of all known species have been discovered in the past 2 decades. In 2025 we identified thousands of previously unknown creatures including 850 in the deep ocean. This is a tiny fraction of the undiscovered species that are thought to reside in the depths of the sea. Humans have explored less than one percent of the ocean floor and vast land areas also remain uncharted. We have identified about 2.5 million species but estimates of the number of undiscovered species range between tens of millions to billions. So, for example, we have identified around 1.1 million insect species, yet many scientists believe that the true number is somewhere between 6 million and 20 million. Share Change Oracle Human Impact Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humanity’s impact on biodiversity has been nothing short of catastrophic — and over the past fifty years, the pace and scale of that destruction have accelerated dramatically. According to the World Wildlife Fund, monitored populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have plummeted by 73 percent since 1970. Over 40 percent of insect species are in decline and a third are endangered. We are also killing off species before we identify them. One study found that 15–59 percent of extinctions may involve species that were never scientifically recorded. It is becoming increasingly apparent that species, both known and unknown are at risk from human activities. The combination of habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and overexploitation, imperils life on Earth. This Is What the Sixth Great Extinction Looks Like Human activity is driving mass extinction. Populations of mammals, birds, and reptiles are collapsing at an alarming pace, while insects — the foundation of the food web — are disappearing at eight times the rate of these vertebrates. Estimates of the total number of species that are going extinct each year range from 10 to 30,000. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has indicated that they believe we are losing 150 species a day, which translates to more than 54,000 extinctions per year. While estimates of the current rate of extinction vary, they are all well above the normal background rate which is estimated to average 1 in a million species each year. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) suggests current extinction rates are 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than natural background rates. This translates to an extinction rate of between 200 to 100,000 species yearly. Around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Some are predicting millions of species will be lost by 2050. The Sixth Great Extinction is not merely the loss of known species; it is the silent erasure of countless forms of life we never had the chance to discover. Share Killing the Cure: How Extinction Is Robbing Humanity of Its Future Species are going extinct faster than we can identify them. Although it garners little attention, this is a matter of supreme importance because every species we lose strips humanity of untold potential — from life-saving pharmaceuticals to transformative breakthroughs in biomimicry that could help us to address some of the most pressing issues of our times. Biodiversity has already provided vast benefits for humanity. This includes medical benefits that run the gamut from popular weight loss drugs (GLP-1 receptor agonists) inspired by a hormone found in the Gila monster to blood pressure medication from snake venom. Fungi have been instrumental in the development of antibiotics, immunosuppressants, cholesterol lowering medication and anti-cancer drugs. There are also species adaptations that inspire human innovation. Every extinction is a possible lost innovation. It may well be that some of the species we have lost could have offered a cure for cancer or provided paradigm changing insights into some of the worlds most pressing issues. The number of possible medical and technological benefits are vast. “We’re still just scratching the surface of what these species can do for humanity,” John Wiens, an American researcher who studies these issues said. We are shredding the manuscript of nature before we have a chance to read it. It is as though the greatest library on Earth is being burned to the ground. The species we never met could have been the one that saved us. Averting a Global Catastrophe Mass die-offs and extinction risk triggering cataclysmic downstream impacts. The loss of species can have a cascade effect that unravels interconnected ecosystems. We are killing keystone animals as well as species that have gone unnoticed. The extinction of a keystone species or detritivores can have serious consequences. The loss of decomposers like saprophytic bacteria and saprotrophic bacteria, could prove cataclysmic. Dead organisms and waste would pile up, locking essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon away; this would starve plants, collapse food chains, disrupt the carbon cycle, and quickly make Earth uninhabitable as soil fertility vanishes and life ceases to be sustainable. Climate change is thought to have caused previous mass extinction events and there is strong evidence to conclude that the climatic changes we are seeing today are not only accelerating the rate of extinction of individual species but also increasing the risk of global extinction. Human generated heating of the Earth has increased the risk of a global extinction from 2 percent to 30 percent. Humanity’s Quietest Atrocity Is Also a Suicide Pact We are discovering new life while simultaneously erasing the diversity that sustains it. The precipitous decline in wildlife illustrates the scale of the crisis. The loss of biodiversity poses a threat to all life on the planet. The fact that we have only identified a fraction of the Earth’s plants and animals underscores our staggering ignorance. Life on Earth depends on an interconnected web of flora and fauna and the loss of biodiversity invites ecosystem breakdown. Ripping the fabric of the interwoven textile of life threatens human civilization. So, humans are not only imperiling the lives of countless millions of species we are sabotaging our own survival by dismantling the systems that sustains us. Anthropogenic species extinction is not just a crime against nature, our failure to protect the natural world from our actions is masochism on a global scale. We are digging our own graves and engineering our own extinction. Hope in the Anthropocene: Identification as Conservation Humans are driving biodiversity loss, including the eradication of unnamed species. A wide range of human activity from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels to authoritarianism are the cause of the interconnected network of crises sometimes referred to as polycrisis. Humans are also the only ones who can reverse the spiral of death that is life in the Anthropocene. We know what must be done, yet we have failed to secure the critical mass of support necessary to act at the scale required. We must address the psychological barriers that prevent us from acting. This starts with some simple messaging targeting those who are not motivated by a sense of moral and ethical responsibility. While some may be swayed by the desire to alleviate suffering and save lives, others are motivated by self-interest. Such individuals may be moved by a desire to conserve nature to profit from the wide array of benefits nature provides. If nothing else they may act to avert the end of human civilization. Efforts to change our perilous trajectory derive immense benefit from cataloguing life. “Discovering new species is important because these species can’t be protected until they’re scientifically described,” Wiens said, adding, “Documentation is the first step in conservation – we can’t safeguard a species from extinction if we don’t know it exists.” Knowing a species makes us more likely to want to support its survival and gives us insight into how we may be able to do so. We cannot protect what we do not know exists — or what we allow to vanish before it is understood. Every plant and animal that makes up the Earth’s biodiversity has its place within the planetary biome. Identifying the undiscovered can help us to preserve individual species and by extension, the natural balance. Efforts to explore, identify and describe new species are the first step toward conservation. More broadly, familiarizing ourselves with our planet’s flora and fauna may cause us to rethink our adversarial attitudes towards Earth’s biota. It may help us to understand that humans are part of nature and the wanton destruction of natural world is not just genocide, it is suicide. Leave a comment Thanks for reading Change Oracle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribed   Like Comment Restack   © 2026 Richard Matthews Unsubscribe