While species extinction, endangerment and loss of habitat stories tend to capture most of the limelight in mainstream media, it is truly astounding just how much biodiversity still exists on Earth.
New species are being discovered every day. In 2009, the most recent year for which reliable data is available, biologists catalogued 19,233 species previously unknown to science. That's an average of just over 52 every single day.
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these are insects (72.3 per cent) followed by plants (11.5 per cent), Fungi (7.1 per cent) and microbes (5.8 per cent).
The ones that tend to be most interesting to us, of course, are the chordates because it is the phylum that includes us, our cousins the primates and most of the animals we are most familiar with, and dependent upon, including mammals and birds.
Chordates make up the smallest group of new species discovered each year (639 in 2009). And again, not surprisingly, most of those were frogs and lizards.
Only a handful of new mammals, primarily bats and rodents, are discovered each year, but it's not exactly rare. It is rarer still to find undocumented primates, although three have been described in the last two years. In 2012, researchers in Borneo discovered a tiny, nocturnal species of slow loris, a relative of lemurs, with big endearing eyes, but that pack a highly toxic bite.
Also found in 2012 was the sleepy-eyed lesula, so named for its distinctive owl-like countenance. It was well-known in the Congo's bush meat trade, but hitherto not known to science.
Just recently, a third new primate was included in a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that catalogued more than 400 new species, which, again not surprisingly, features a familiar hierarchy, plants (58.5 per cent), fish (19 per cent), amphibians (13.1 per cent), reptiles (5 per cent) and birds (4.1 per cent). The report did not include the vast array of insects also collected, which will keep taxonomists busy for years to come.
The lone primate is a species of titi monkey, whose offspring exhibit the unusual trait of purring like kittens.
This is where the loss of habitat issue becomes relevant.
The report "has shown us just how important the region is for humanity and how fundamentally important it is to research it, understand it, and conserve it," said Claudio Maretti, leader of the Living Amazon Initiative at WWF. "The amazing Amazon rain forest is under threat from deforestation and dam development. We cannot allow this natural heritage to be lost forever."
All of this, I confess, may have been a bit of a long-winded build-up to the most exciting of new species news. In journalistic jargon, it kind of turns the "inverted pyramid" style of news writing on its head. Saving the best bit for last is not something I would do in a news story, but this is a column-that, plus the headline and photo puts it out there anyway.
It is exceedingly rare to find a new carnivorous mammal. Globally, only two have been proposed in the last decade, both big cats.
In 2006, the Sundaland clouded leopard was classified as a new species through genetic studies, but it had never been seen in the wild until 2010 when a cat believed to be a specimen was caught on film in Malaysian Borneo.
The second is a group of 15 dark-maned lions from the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, zoo, which researchers say are "genetically distinct," but there is still some controversy whether they truly constitute a separate species and questions regarding the motivation of zookeepers who stand to secure increased funding based on the discovery.
In the Western Hemisphere, not a single new carnivore had been described for 35 years, that is, until now.
Meet olinguito (pictured below). This teddy bear-faced critter, now recognized as the smallest member of the raccoon family, is endemic to the cloud forests of Columbia and Ecuador. While these forests are difficult to study and the two-pound tree-dwelling olinguitos are very elusive in the wild, one could still say they had been hiding in plain sight for decades.
In 2003, Kristopher Helgen, curator of mammals for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, was studying museum specimens of olingos. He noted some individuals were smaller with tinier teeth and longer, denser fur. Later, while visiting Chicago's Field Museum, he discovered skins similar to his odd olingo specimens that were catalogued as being collected in the northern Andes at altitudes much higher than olingos are known to live.
This led to several expeditions to the Andes during which Helgen and colleagues collected DNA which revealed not only that olinguitos were a distinct species from olingos, but four subspecies of olinguito across its geographic range.
So, it is newly classified, but not newly known. One olinguito, misidentified as an olingo, even lived in a series of American zoos during the 1960s and 1970s. He was moved around because, not surprisingly, he would not breed with olingos.
This news is not only excited in and of itself, it heralds that the age of discovery, even of mammalian predators, is not over. Scientists estimate there are 20 million species in the world yet to be identified. I can't wait to find out what is next?
