Biodiversity
Welcome to c/Biodiversity @ Mander.xyz!
A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
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This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.
2023-06-16: We invite our users to contribute resources for the sidebar.
2023-06-15: Looking for mods!
About
Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.
Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...
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- Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
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Quick Links
Resources
- The Convention on Biological Diversity (UN)
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Maps of the World's Biodiversity
- Ecosystems and Human Well-Being (free e-book)
- Falling Fruit: Map of the Urban Harvest
Bypass Paywalls
- On Ethics 1 2 3 4
- WaybackMachine (archive.org)
- Behind the Overlay Browser Extension
- ladder
- Anna's Archive
- Bypass Paywalls Browser Extension (see readme for Chrome & mobile options.)
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Confirming that all life on earth has a common ancestor would reduce the likelihood of panspermia, wouldn't it?
If life originated in space then it might happen more than once, so we might find that some life forms do not share a common ancestor at all.
If all life forms have a common ancestor then that implies abiogenesis is rare.
Of course, it could be that abiogenesis is hard but seeding life by asteroids is easy, so more research is needed.
Either answer is interesting
Not really, from what I understand, it seems that life just needed a match start with the right amount of momentum in a place where the building blocks were present in abundance. There might have been false starts to life, more than once. I think the rare thing is more for the right conditions (in addition to and especially in relation to the energy source: sun) to be present for the match to spark and then the conditions must be stable enough for the momentum to keep up, like a tornado.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/building-blocks-of-life-found-on-samples-collected-from-an-asteroid-180980231/
Tldr sperm gets shot everywhere, but the fertile eggs are rare.