Research shows where these species may be “hidden”.
At least hundreds of hitherto unknown mammals are hiding in public view around the world, according to a new study. The researchers found that most of these hidden mammals are small, many of them bats, rodents, muscles and moles. These unknown mammals are hidden from public view, in part because most are small and look so much like familiar animals that biologists could not identify them as actually a different species, said study co-author Bryan Carstens, a professor. evolution, ecology and organic biology at Ohio State University. “Small, subtle differences in appearance are harder to spot when you look at a tiny animal that weighs 10 grams than when you look at something the size of a human,” Carstens said. “You can not say they are different species if you do not do a genetic analysis.” The study was published March 28, 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Small mammals, such as this two-colored lizard, are more likely than larger animals to “hide” new species. Credit: Werner Korschinsky, via Wikimedia Commons The team, led by student Danielle Parsons of Ohio State, used a supercomputer and machine learning techniques to analyze millions of publicly available gene sequences from 4,310 mammal species, as well as data on where animals live and their environment. , their life story and other relevant information. This allowed them to create a prediction model to identify species of mammals that may contain hidden species. “Based on our analysis, a conservative estimate would be that there are hundreds of mammal species around the world that have not yet been identified,” Carstens said. That finding, in itself, would not come as a surprise to biologists, he said. Only about 1 to 10% of Earth species have been officially described by researchers. “What we did new was to predict where these new species are most likely to be found,” Carstens said. The results showed that unidentified species are more likely to be found in families of small animals, such as bats and rodents. The researchers’ model also predicted that hidden species would most likely be found in species that have wider geographical areas with greater variability in temperature and rainfall. Many of the hidden species are also likely to occur in tropical rainforests, which is not surprising because most mammal species are found there. But many unidentified species are also likely to live here in the United States, Carstens said. His lab has identified some of them. For example, in 2018, Carstens and then-graduate student Ariadna Morales published a paper showing that the little brown bat, found in much of North America, is actually five different species. This study also showed a key reason why it is important to identify new species. One of the newly demarcated bats had a very narrow area where it lived, right around the Great Basin in Nevada – making its protection particularly critical. “This knowledge is important for people who do maintenance work. We can not protect a species if we do not know it exists. “Once we name something as a species, it matters in many legal and other ways,” Carstens said. Based on the results of this study, Carstens estimates that close to 80% of mammal species worldwide have been identified. “The shocking thing is that mammals are described very well compared to beetles or ants or other animal species,” he said. “We know a lot more about mammals than many other animals, because they tend to be bigger and more closely related to humans, which makes them more interesting to us.” Reference: “Analysis of biodiversity data suggests that mammalian species are hidden in predictable places” by Danielle J. Parsons, Tara A. Pelletier, Jamin G. Wieringa, Drew J. Duckett and Bryan C. Carstens, March 28, 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.DOI: 10.1073 / pnas.2103400119 The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ohio Center for Supercomputers. Other co-authors were Tara Pelletier, an assistant professor of biology at Radford University. and Jamin Wieringa and Drew Duckett, graduate students in the State of Ohio.
