Salty Camel

In one of my former lives I worked on a large botanical taxonomic database back in the days when anything over 25mhz was a supercomputer. Wired featured an article about The Whole Critter Catalogue where scientists are trying to identify and classify every species in the next 25 years. Taxonomy makes DNA look like a walk in the park. As a chemist I was completely amazed by how disorganised and unsystematic taxonomy methodologies were when I was working with the database for just one flora and I can only imagine the mayhem and difficulty involved with a flora of the entire planet.

Coupled with the biodiversity mavens like E.O.Wilson, this is precisely what technology should be used for in order to catalogue species before they disappear and, hopefully, help keep them from disappearing. They recently found a new species of Camel that thrives on salty water but is in danger of extinction. I'm not sure if knowing about the species we humans manage to erase from the planet is better than blissful ignorance, but I sincerely hope the planet wins in the end.