Looks like anchored baggie..What is it?

[archman]

Highest species diversity? While I always boast about the superiority of worms to other groups this is one claim that isn't true. For multicellular organisms that distinction goes to Arthropoda which includes insects (although nobody has a good estimate for nematodes) while bacteria probably outnumber everything put together.

Well Leslie, this is why I qualified it with "arguably". A lot of the deep-sea benthic ecologists actually do believe that polychaete species diversity exceeds that for insects, but the insect diversity values are biased from the one-two punch of much greater sampling intensities and much greater taxonomic work. Our deep-sea species regression curves for polychaetes almost never plateau out, indicating a vast untapped reservoir of steenking worms... many of them probably those crummy capitellids.

And the nematode diversity's thought to probably exceed even the polychaetes. I believe the current estimate for quantitative deep-sea macrofaunal sampling lies at under 3 billionths of one percent. The Amazon can't even keep up with that, even including the 3-D areal cover from the canopy. The higher-level predictions for undescribed deep-sea species lies at 10 million, of which upwards of 30% of that is strongly argued by many to be polychaetes.

Now granted insect biodiversity is postulated to be as high as 30 million all by itself, or 4 million by more reasonable estimates. But from that, just over a million are worked up already. That is, indeed, a lot of bugs.

Compare that to around 13,000 polychaetes, and estimates by polychaete specialists at a capping of around 30,000 total species, and the worms appear indeed to be on the short side of the stick. But apply a model standardizing sample area and taxonomic expertise between polychaetes and insects, and the disparity can vanish rather quickly. It's a theoretical argument, to be sure, but certainly not a ridiculed one.

Bacterial diversity can be conveniently argued away (arguably ) by the very different standards that are used to delineate them as "species". This is also true for the Fungi, and a great many protozoan lines where sexual reproduction takes second fiddle, or is just plain peculiar. That's sort of a cop out, but with all the fruitcake ways biodiversity theory is currently being studied, it's a valid one.

How can a worm person defend insects? That's just lame... LAME!!!!

 

[LeslieH]

How can a worm person defend insects? That's just lame... LAME!!!!

And you're defending worms? When did hell freeze over?

 

[archman]

And you're defending worms? When did hell freeze over?

Often I wind up working with or learning under most of the polychaete specialists that are found in Texas. They must have *contaminated* me.