Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, I was just reading this really interesting thing, right? It's all about the Natural History Museum in London, and, well, you know how when you go to museums, you only see the stuff that's on display? Apparently, there's this whole other, like, massive museum hidden away behind the scenes.
It's, like, got seventy million items or something crazy, covering, you know, every kind of life on Earth. And they add, I don't know, a hundred thousand new things *every* year. But it's the stuff you *don't* see, that's, like, really mind-blowing. Imagine rooms and rooms of cabinets and drawers, filled with, like, jars of animals in fluid, millions of pinned insects, drawers overflowing with shiny shells, dinosaur bones, skulls of early humans, you know, just *everything*. The text compared it to like, wandering through Darwin's computer. Apparently, the storage rooms alone have, like, twenty kilometers of shelving, just stacked with jars of animals in methylated spirits.
So, inside there's, like, stuff collected by Joseph Banks in Australia, Alexander von Humboldt in the Amazon, Darwin's stuff from the Beagle, but also just, you know, tons and tons of other things, either super rare or historically important, or, like, both. And, obviously, people would *love* to get their hands on it. And, well, some people apparently *do*.
There's this story about a guy, Richard Meinertzhagen, who was a big bird collector and, like, wrote books. He was, like, a regular at the museum, always there taking notes for his writing. Then, after a while, the museum gets his collection of bird specimens, and when they open the boxes, they're shocked because, like, *tons* of them have the museum's own labels on them! Turns out, he'd been "collecting" specimens for years, you know, taking them. That's why he always wore a big coat, even in the summer. Crazy, right?
And then there's another story about this, like, "distinguished gentleman" who was a regular in the mollusk section. They caught him stuffing valuable seashells into the hollow legs of his Zimmer frame! I mean, wow.
One of the researchers, Richard Fortey, said, you know, "I think there are always people who covet the things that are here." Makes sense, I guess.
So, the text describes walking through the different departments, seeing people at desks, carefully studying arthropods, palm leaves, boxes of old bones. It's like everyone's working on this massive project that'll never actually be finished, so there's no rush. There's this report about an expedition to the Indian Ocean that the museum published, I think it was, like, forty-four years after the expedition *happened*. So, yeah, things move at their own pace.
There's even a bit about this elevator they were riding in, going super slowly, and this older guy who's been studying a plant called Hypericum for forty-two years. Forty-two years! Like, what do you even *do* with that much research? He retired in '89, but he still comes in every week. Apparently, he knows that plant really, really well.
The text then goes on to describe the botany department, and they meet this guy named Lane Ellis, who's in charge of the moss collection. Apparently, a lot of what people think is moss is actually lichen, and that true mosses aren't that picky about where they grow. There’s a quote, “Perhaps no great body of plants is quite so nearly useless, commercially or economically, as the mosses.” It says even still, it’s a thriving kingdom, with thousands of species. Apparently, there’s even new species. He mentioned he went to Malaysia and saw a species no one had recorded before.
You’d think no one would want to dedicate their life to something like that, but there’s a whole community who study moss, and, apparently, they’re pretty passionate about it. The text mentioned, there are arguments and all sorts of debates, apparently. They had even gone so far as to reclassify a kind of moss into three different genera, and of course, that requires re-filing everything and updating the books, so everyone gets annoyed. So, like, plant taxonomy is a *serious* business, you know?
There's this other plant – Stanford Marsh Moss – that's only been found on the Stanford University campus in California and in Cornwall, England. How did it get there? No one knows. But, yeah, they had to rename that one, too.
Anyway, apparently the collectors of old, like a guy called George Hunt, who may have actually contributed to the extinction of some moss, really helped build up the massive collection, 780,000 specimens, some are old and beautifully labeled. Some might be by Robert Brown, the guy who showed us Brownian motion and the cell nucleus, you know?
The cabinets are really nice, but they were, you know, like “Oh, those, those came from Sir Joseph Bank’s place in Soho Square, you know, he had them made for the specimens from the ‘Endeavor’ voyage.” The ‘Endeavor’ voyage being Cook’s voyage to watch Venus crossing the Sun and announce Australia as a colony.
Banks paid a *ton* of money to join the three-year trip, with his own team. Nobody had ever found so many new plants before. And apparently, this was a boom for plant discovery in general. Even this one printer, Thomas Nuttall, walked halfway across America and back and discovered hundreds of new plants. Some guy called John Fraser spent years in the wilderness to collect stuff for Catherine the Great, but she died so he just went back to England and sold the plants, and got rich.
It was a totally different world back then. People were, like, obsessed with classifying *everything*. That's where Carl Linnaeus comes in. He's the guy who came up with our modern system of naming plants and animals, you know, *Carolus Linnaeus*.
So, like, his dad was a poor priest, and Linnaeus was kind of a lazy student. His dad, like, almost apprenticed him to a shoemaker. He begged for another chance, and then he became, like, obsessed with academics. He was super into nature. And he's, like, famous for inventing the modern system of classification, but he was also famous for being, like, super arrogant about it. He said he was the greatest botanist or zoologist *ever*.
Also, he was really into sex. Apparently, some clams reminded him of female anatomy, and he named all the parts. He classified plants by their reproductive organs, and wrote about flowers like they were people having love affairs. There’s this quote about "love even coming to plants. Males and females… celebrate their nuptials… with sex organs to show who is male and who is female.” He actually named a plant "Clitoria." People thought he was weird, but his system was, like, *genius*. Before him, plant names were, like, super long and descriptive, but he shortened them, so they were actually, you know, *useful*. He classified animals based on physical characteristics, too.
Anyway, over the years they started adding to the system. And by the 1850s the concept of the order, the class and the family were being put in place, but the word, “phylum” only came about in 1876, by a German, apparently, and, like, up until the 1900s the words “family” and “order” could be used interchangeably, so that could have been really confusing, for a while. He originally divided animals into six classes, “mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects and worms.” But he put almost everything in the last group, so yeah.
The thing is, apparently the way they classify things is still a bit of a mess. Like, how many phyla are there? Some people say about thirty, some say twenty, and one guy said eighty-nine! It depends on if you're a "lumper" or a "splitter," you know?
Even just what to call something on the surface, they argue all the time. It’s a huge mess. Apparently, there are about 5,000 kinds of grass, and it's hard even for grass experts to tell them apart. So, a lot of them have been discovered and named, like, twenty times. There’s a whole book, just for one country, cleaning up all the synonymous names.
So, there’s an organization that actually makes decisions about plant classification. They declared that the California fuchsia, a common garden plant, was going to be moved to another genus. And the people who grew fuchsias were, like, *not* happy about it. They protested to this, like, "Committee for Seed Plants" which is an actual thing. They actually overturned the decision.
The text explains that, like, all these arguments and reclassifications happen in every branch of biology, so it's really hard to figure out the total number of species. The number is somewhere between three million and two *hundred* million. It's estimated that we haven't even *discovered* as much as ninety-seven percent of the plant and animal species on Earth! And out of all the ones we know about, most of them only have, like, a name, a couple of samples in a museum, and some notes in a journal.
I mean, it's, like, crazy how little we actually know.
You can even just ask the experts how many fungi there are, and one might say 70,000 and another might say 100,000 – and it is just fungi, you know. Or someone says there are 4000 species of earthworms, and another says 12,000. And that’s just earthworms!
One guy spent forty years cleaning up all the messed up classification of primates! Imagine doing that for mollusks, or beetles, or lichens. So the number of different species can only be estimated. Like, someone sprayed pesticides in a rainforest, and based on what fell, they estimated that there were thirty million species of insects on Earth, even though that seemed low to him! And others have given different estimates based on that. It's just guesswork, really. But that's all they can do.
There are "about 10,000 active taxonomists" in the world, but it costs a lot of money and paperwork to register a new species, so they only register about 15,000 a year.
So there's a "taxonomist crisis," not a biodiversity crisis! One guy said that there aren't any qualified taxonomists in the whole of Africa. They take ages to train and they are not being replaced. One said, “They are real fossils,” and was quitting to go elsewhere because he couldn’t get any funding. One writer says that they have a lack of status and resources so that they’re just rewriting old stuff and not actually doing new stuff.
The guy from Wired even started a foundation to discover and record *every* species. But it was only, like, estimated to need, like, over a billion pounds, and it only had, like, three quarters of a million.
At that rate of discovery it would take over 15,000 years to figure out what kinds of insects there are, let alone anything else.
So, why don't we know more? Well, there are lots of reasons.
A lot of creatures are really small, and easy to overlook. Like, the dust mites in your mattress. There are millions of them, and they come out at night and eat your dead skin flakes. There could be 40,000 of them in your pillow! The text says your pillow is probably a tenth dead skin, live mites, dead mites, and mite poop. But at least they’re your mites.
Those mites weren't even discovered until 1965.
So, you know, if we only noticed something that's living in our beds in the nineteen-sixties, imagine what we don't know about the stuff that's *really* small. You grab a handful of dirt, and there are billions of bacteria in it. If you have a good scope. Most of them we have never seen. It's all a "cryptic fauna", you know. We simply have no idea what's there.
So, two scientists got a gram of soil and found four to five thousand bacteria. That was *more* than were in the entire guide book on bacteria. Then they did the same thing nearby, and found another four to five *thousand*. But that's nothing compared to what's out there.
So, we're not looking in the right places, either. One botanist found a thousand new flowering plants in a few days, in Borneo. They were easy to find, but nobody looked. You can also look up the top of the mountain. He found a few new things there, just like that.
Tropical rainforests are only six percent of the world's area, but are home to half of the world's animals and two-thirds of flowering plants. But there are not enough people studying those. These are some of the most precious plants in the world. At least almost all flowering plants have never been checked for their use as medicine. Plants have to be able to fight pests, so they have to learn how to produce good chemicals. One in four medicines come from about forty different plants. We could also be losing medicine.
Also, there was this one species of bacteria that was discovered on the wall of a pub "where generations of men had urinated."
There aren't enough experts, either.
Like, tardigrades, also called water bears, can live anywhere, boil, freeze, and then just come back to life. They've found between three and five hundred of those, and no one knows how many there are. There were a lot of people who studied tardigrades, and there was one expert.
Fungi are also amazing and everywhere. We mostly don't think about the importance of fungi. They were essential for our dairy and cheese. There are about seventy thousand of them, but scientists think there may be closer to two million. But most fungi people make food, so there are probably not that many people who are looking for fungi.
Also, the world is a big place. Even though we can travel around it so easily, it's actually huge when you're studying it. Okapi, the giraffe's close relative, wasn't even thought of until the 20th century. The Takahe, a flightless bird of New Zealand, was thought to be dead for two hundred years, but then they found it in the mountains. People in Tibet found a horse, called Riwoche, one time, and were shocked when they found out the rest of the world had only seen them in prehistoric cave paintings.
Some people even think there may be giant sloths in the Amazon! Maybe the person just wanted to be left alone. But nobody is going to survey every single spot.
But you need to go *everywhere* to find it. Some cave explorers in Romania found a group of eyeless insects and spiders in a cave that were all totally unknown. They ate microbes eating hydrogen sulfide from a spring.
It may be depressing to not know everything, but it's also really amazing. Our planet is able to surprise us.
One of the most amazing things about science is how many people are willing to put their life into some niche area of studying. One guy, Henry Edward Crampton, spent fifty years quietly studying the land snails of Polynesia, measuring their shells over and over again, just to the most minute level. Each line of his charts may have taken him weeks to figure out.
Alfred Kinsey, the guy who studied human sexuality, was an entomologist, and really dedicated. He walked about four thousand kilometers over two years and collected three hundred thousand wasp specimens. We don't know how many times he got stung.
It's hard to make sure there are enough people who are studying this stuff, though. I asked one guy how they make sure to replace scientists. And he said that there aren't people on the bench waiting to play. If a scientist is gone, that area might just go away. He said that’s the reason someone who spent forty-two years working on one thing, might be considered pretty special.