On the Origin of Speciation at the Union Tribune

On the Origin of Speciation by Scott LaFee of the Union Tribune:

No one knows how many species of animal, plant, fungus and microbe live on Earth.
Almost 2 million have been described, but millions more exist. Thousands of new species are identified each year, mostly small or microbial, but also birds, fish and mammals.
In a study of just 19 trees in Panama, 1,000 of the 1,200 beetle species found were not previously known. An estimated 40 percent of South America's freshwater fish have not yet been classified.
According to the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, a single square meter of temperate forest can hold 200,000 mites. A similar-sized plot of tropical grassland may contain 32 million nematodes; a single gram of its soil 90 million bacteria and other microorganisms.
Life abounds – and it abounds in variety. Even before the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his epic 1859 book, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” scientists and others had pondered the divergence of nature's multitudes, a process now called speciation.

Read the complete article here.