“We’ve only touched the surface of understanding animal life,” said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. “We’ve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.”

Taking an exact count of Earth’s creatures may not seem like the most important task, but taxonomy, the science of discovering, describing and categorizing living things, is “the foundation for understanding life on this planet,” Fisher said.

Though taxonomists have been cataloguing plants and animals for more than 250 years, they still have no exact answer to the question, “How many species are on Earth?” “It’s a very simple question, but we have no simple answer,” Fisher said.

One of the reasons we can’t get an accurate count is that the bulk of the things that have yet to be discovered and described are in the realm of the very small: insects, bacteria and other microbes. We’ve done a pretty good job of categorizing from the size of a fly up,” but anything below that is far less known, said Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

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