Officially, Earth boasts roughly two million species. Unofficially, scientists suspect there could be millions — perhaps over 100 million — more.
Each year, scientists add thousands of new species to the scientific record in an attempt to get a better count. Some discoveries stem from intrepid adventures deep into the jungle, while others come from reanalyzing old specimens stored in dusty museum collections.
Each new plant, fish, beetle or bird is a unique and irreplaceable answer to the question of how to make a living on Earth, and scientists are racing to describe them. Climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis add extra urgency to these efforts, since many of these new species risk going extinct just as soon as they're discovered.
Here are five species that struck NPR as especially wonderful, both because of the biology of the species, as well as the stories behind their discovery.
Clouded tiger-cat
Biologist Tadeu de Oliveira remembers well the email that sparked his decade-and-a-half effort to propose a new species of tiger-cat.
"Knowing them so deeply as I do, I knew this was not just some sort of variation," he said. "I knew it would go deeper, way deeper."
De Oliveira, a tiger-cat expert at Maranhão State University in Brazil, has spent many hours looking at the two described tiger-cats that prowl South America. But the photos in that email, from camera traps in the Andes mountains, struck him as different. The house-cat-sized creature in these photos had more irregular spots, seemingly thicker fur, and just moved differently than the known species, he told NPR.
He teamed up with over 40 other scientists to formally describe the clouded tiger-cat (Leopardis pardinoides) as a new species. The investigation revealed the clouded tiger-cat as genetically and geographically distinct from the other two species, the northern tiger-cat and southern tiger-cat. While those species stick to the lowlands of savannahs and coastal forests, the clouded-tiger cat is only found in the mountains of Central and South America.
They also discovered some unusual physical differences.
"Females have only one pair of nipples, not two, as in the other tiger-cats," de Oliveira says. "That's totally different."
However, the researchers estimate that the current range of all three tiger-cats is likely about half of what it once was, putting them at risk of extinction, de Oliveira says.
Fluffy longhorn beetle
Sometimes, new species are discovered entirely by chance.
Entomologist James Tweed, a Ph.D. student at the University of Queensland in Australia, was camping south of Brisbane when he was walking to brush his teeth one morning and a flash of white on the ground made him do a double take.
"Initially, I just thought it was a bird dropping. But the fact it was bright white, which is not something you'd normally see on a leaf in the forest understory, made me think I should look closer," he said. "I'm glad I did, because it turned out to be this spectacular beetle."
Tweed had never seen a longhorn beetle like this one before, with spindly white hairs sprouting from all over its body. He snapped some photos and sent them to local beetle experts, who confirmed they'd never seen such a bug either.
"For it to be as striking as this one and not to have been found previously was really surprising," Tweed says, especially since researchers are often out studying the area.
The beetle was so different that it turned out to be a whole new genus, which is a broader taxonomic classification than species. Tweed and his colleagues named it Excastra albopilosa—Excastra being Latin for "from the camp" and albopilosa for "white and hairy."
Its flashy appearance may have evolved to resemble a beetle infected with an insect-killing fungus, Tweed says, which could deter predators. "But it's guesswork at this point," he says.
Tweed's campground find is the only reported sighting and specimen to date, he says. "I'm waiting for that day when another observation pops up on our nature list and we can kind of piece together a bit more information about the species."
Superstar of an orchid
Orchids are prized for their elaborate, ostentatious flowers, but a new species from Madagascar described this year is notable because of a really long tube. Technically called a nectar spur, the tube funnels sugary liquid to pollinators who can reach it, and this new species has one that's over a foot long.
Considering the tens of thousands of species of flowering plants, "this is the longest nectar spur of any, relative to flower size," says João Farminhão, a botanist at the University of Coimbra Botanic Garden in Portugal. "In absolute terms, it's the third longest ever."
It's topped by Darwin's Orchid, which is also endemic to Madagascar. Upon inspecting the 17-inch-long spur of that specimen in the 1860s, the famed biologist wrote to a friend, "Good Heavens what insect can suck it." Later, he predicted there must be a moth on the island with an equally long proboscis, a prediction of how species can co-evolve. Sure enough, two decades later scientists identified an African hawkmoth that pollinated the orchid.
S. impraedicta is only distantly related to Darwin's orchid, but it, too, relies on a similarly long-tongued hawkmoth to pollinate its ivory-white flowers. While the orchid was first collected in 2009, it was officially described just this year by Farminhão and his colleagues.
Despite its fresh debut, the plant is already endangered by mining projects in Madagascar, which clear the trees it lives on. To protect it from orchid hunters, Farminhão and his colleagues are withholding its exact location.
Malagasy frogs
There are frogs that live their entire lives in the tiny pools of water that collect on the leaves of the Pandanus tree in Madagascar.
"When I was doing an independent research project in the rainforest, I noticed these frogs that looked really different from anything I was seeing in the guidebook," said Hugh Gabriel, who now works at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.
The frogs were hidden within the palm-like leaves of a Pandanus tree, and they struck Gabriel as somewhat smaller and differently colored than the species he'd been seeing in his research. He reached out to the author of his guidebook, who confirmed Gabriel's hunch, and they collaborated to describe three new species.
The frogs spend their entire lives in Pandanus trees, which resemble yucca or aloe plants, but can grow much taller. The water that pools at the base of the leaves supports veritable mini-ecosystems, and these frogs likely munch on the invertebrates that also call the Pandanus home. The frogs' calls sound like "rain dropping onto leaves," Gabriel says, but not much else is known about how they make a living.
"I was really under no impression that this was a discovery in the total sense of the word," says Gabriel. "The Malagasy people have been living there for a few thousand years and certainly knew these frogs existed." In acknowledgement of that, he and his colleagues named the new species Guibemantis ambakoana, G. vakoa and G. rianasoa after the Malagasy words for the Pandanus tree and a nearby waterfall. These three species add to the more than 400 species of amphibians on the island.
Skeleton panda sea squirts
Catch a quick glimpse of this photo and you might mistake the group of new sea squirt species for a gaggle of underwater trick-or-treaters dressed like panda bear skeletons.
Photos of the spooky sea squirts were circulating online among diving enthusiasts in Japan before Naohiro Hasegawa, a biologist at the University of Hokkaido, saw a tweet with the critters. He knew of no sea squirts with that striking coloration, and he and his colleagues set off to Kumejima, a tiny island west of Okinawa, to collect specimens. Sure enough, morphological and genetic analyses confirmed it was a new species, which they dubbed Clavelina ossipandae.
Sea squirts live their lives fixed to the ground, filtering out phytoplankton as they suck water through their mouths. The skeleton-like lines of this new sea squirt are actually blood vessels that run through the sea squirt's gills, the researchers say. It's unclear why the sea squirts have their black-and-white markings, but it's almost certainly not a tactic to score more Halloween candy.
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