Diane Toomey
The Biggest Biological Tally Yet
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” is a scenario scientists are working hard to avoid in the Great Smoky Mountains. Only 10 percent of the life forms in the national park have been catalogued. Scientists, aided by amateur naturalists, have launched a massive, 15-year effort to inventory and understand every life form […]
Lemur Experiment
Lemurs are some of the most endangered primates in the world. Found only in Madagascar and one group of neighboring islands, these creatures have lost fully 90 percent of their habitat since humans first landed on Madagascar two millennium ago. But, now researchers at Duke University’s Primate Center hope to give lemus a chance at […]
A Little Known Planet, Part 3
We’ve heard how both researchers and the lay public can help count up the earth’s creatures. Now, in the final segment of Living on Earth’s special, we’ll see how technology is helping to speed up the identification of species. But first, we’ll see how things were done the old fashioned way. And for that, Living […]
A Little Known Planet, Part 2
Nine years ago, the National Science Foundation launched a grant program to help pull the basic science of species identification out of the scientific backwaters. The initiative funds graduate students in particularly hard hit fields of taxonomy. Living on Earth’s Diane Toomey tagged along with one such student and her professor.
A Little Known Planet, Part 1
It may be surprising to learn that we really have no idea how many species exist on our planet. Many experts believe that the earth plays host to anywhere from 10 to 30 million species. A few say that number could be much higher. But by any reckoning, only a fraction of them are known […]