How many plants and animals will become extinct this year?
The rapid disappearance of species was ranked as one of the planet's gravest environmental worries. by Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi. Extinction is defined as ‘wiping out’ or annihilation’: if a certain type of plant or animal becomes extinct, it simply no longer exists. This may occur on a local or regional scale or, in the most extreme cases, on a global scale. Nobody knows how many species exist on Earth today. About 1.82 million species have been given a specific name, but this is very incomplete sample of what is out there. In 1982, Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC, USA) publishes a report in which he proposed that estimates of biodiversity on Earth are seriously underestimated. He suggested that there might be 30 million species of insects alone. This conclusion was based largely on his finding that, in the tropical rainforest, insect species were often specific to individual trees. If any given tree in a tropical rainforest houses a number of unique insect ...