Scientists have identified an estimated 10% of all species on Earth. Here’s what they found in 2024
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A toothy toadstool. A vegetarian piranha with a distinctive mark. And a pygmy pipehorse floating in the Indian Ocean shallows.
These wild wonders were among the hundreds of previously unknown species of animals, plants and fungi that scientists named and described for the first time in 2024, expanding our surprisingly limited knowledge of Earth’s diversity.
“Scientists estimate that we’ve identified only one-tenth of all species on Earth,” said Dr.
Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
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“While it is critical to place protections on known threatened species, we must also allocate resources towards identifying unknown species that may be just as important to the functioning of an ecosystem,” Bennett said.
Researchers connected to the institution described 138 new species in 2024, including 32 fish. One standout was a pygmy pipehorse named Cylix nkosi. The seahorse relative was originally found in 2021 in the cool temperate waters surrounding the North Island of New Zealand, but the species described this year was discovered in the subtropical waters off South Africa, expanding the known range of this group to the Indian Ocean
“South African reefs present notoriously difficult diving conditions with rough weather and intense, choppy waves we knew we only had one dive to find it,” underwater photographer and marine biologist Richard Smith said in a statement.
“This species is also quite cryptic, about the size of a golf tee, but luckily we spotted a female camouflaged against some sponges about a mile offshore on the sandy ocean floor.”
The researchers involved in describing the new species chose nkosi as its name. A reference to the local Zulu word for “chief,” the name reflects the species’ crown-like head shape and acknowledges South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province where it was found.
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