standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

the land had more species. The terrestrial people had compared their
estimates for land species with the known number of marine species, which
of course let them win easily. Fred Grassle had taken the statistics used by
tropical rainforest researchers, based on 12 trees, and extrapolated them
to the world. When this formula was applied to marine systems, it produced
figures in the region of 10 6 to 10 8 nematode species worldwide. The
message conveyed by these “political” figures was that applying the same
sorts of dodgy statistics would yield the same sorts of telephone numbers
for marine as for terrestrial systems. They would be big numbers – no one
knew how many -- to be taken with a pinch of salt.
One of the problems with nematode taxonomy was the existence of
sibling clusters. The standard of taxonomy for marine nematodes was well
below the standard for terrestrial nematodes. Morphological taxonomy was
still using 1930s technology. Moreover, of the 4000 described species,
around half came from the beaches and estuaries of northwest Europe.
Moving offshore from northwest Europe led rapidly to areas where all the
nematodes were unknown. John Tietjen, the inventor of deep-sea
nematology, attempting a taxonomic study of the Venezuela Basin, had
estimated that he could fit only about 1% of the species to a name,
assuming that they were not siblings – another unknown.
All nematode specimens from the deep sea were likely to be
unknown. Once they were on a slide, they could probably be sorted into
putative morphological species with a reasonable degree of assurance,
because the sibling problem would probably not be too great at the core
level. Thus, the next step, with the help of the drawings, would be to work
out how many species the core contained. A single core from the abyss
might be expected to have 40 or 50, which could be sorted into species
reasonably well. It could also be assumed that, if animals in two cores from
the same place looked the same, they probably were the same and could
be so designated. Such was the taxonomy being employed at the museum
level, the highest achievable. Perhaps only 20 people in the world could
sort deep-sea nematodes into species at that level.
Biodiversity
Lambshead cited more or less comparable data on species diversity
from around the world that he had collected with Guy Boucher,
nematologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. They had
sorted the sources of the data into European estuaries, coral lagoons, sublittoral,
tropical, offshore Europe and the Mediterranean, bathyal (off
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