James Stewart

But how many more species are out there that no one's cataloged yet?

I wish I could give you a nice round number to go off and continue your day with, but the answer is actually way more exciting.

Well, at least to me anyway.

Even the best estimate suggests that only 20% of Earth's species have been documented by Western science, with potentially millions more unknown and unnamed.

Even in the last few years, new species are being uncovered every single day.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew reported that 172 new plant and fungus species were described globally in 2024 alone, many of them in tropical regions.

The same applies to animals too.

A WWF survey found 441 new species within the Amazon rainforest over the span of just four years.

That's roughly one new species every three days.

It's staggering.

In 2024 alone, scientists found a blob-headed catfish, a new marsupial in Peru, three new amphibians, and even a new species of anaconda, the northern green anaconda, casually the largest and heaviest snake in the world, all in parts of the Amazon rainforest.

And, not for the first time, science is supercharging this process.

Because we now have ways to sample the jungle without ever having to see the animal.

A cutting edge advancement in environmental DNA called eDNA means all we have to do is simply filter water when looking for genetic animal traces.

A landmark 2016 study found that rivers act like conveyor belts of biodiversity information.

In real terms, water samples essentially contain trace amounts of DNA from fish, frogs, even land mammals from upstream.

So scientists can vacuum river water through a filter and then do DNA sequencing or PCR.

This is called environmental DNA or eDNA.

It's like fishing for genes.

You pull up the filter and see whose DNA is there.