A BOOK HAVING ALL SPECIES

BY CARL ZIMMER
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of LifeWhile many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. The Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.. On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.Yet a number of researchers wonder if it will reach its final goal. The encyclopedia is not the first attempt to catalog every species on the planet, and previous efforts have failed. “I have seen 20 years of good ideas go nowhere,” said Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto biologist.