Estimates are that ¼ of ocean species life in coral reefs. Unfortunately, you will never see an exact number, because they haven’t all been identified. Marine biologists have carefully examined most reefs and exhaustively examined some areas, but their estimates are always plus or minus a thousand or more species of fish. They know they’re there, but their exact number is still unknown.
Undiscovered species are exciting for biologists, not just because they often get to name them, but because the new species may have some immediate, practical benefit to humanity. Science readers know that humans get many of our best ideas from plants and animals, which is partly why we obsess over how bumblebees fly, geckos stick and dolphin echolocate. Maybe we can improve helicopters, adhesives and sonar, if we learn their secrets.
Which brings us to the fang blenny, a tiny striped fish with a venom that acts like a powerful pain drug. Researchers are excited that the bite contains a natural pain killer that is chemically similar to a peptide found in humans. Maybe it will lead to a safer pain treatment without the side effects of opioids.
Now some overly skeptical cynics on this site will say, “aha, it’s just a possibility, so the headline could be wrong!” To which I respond, “nonsense”.
Practical benefits from nature have been discovered by humans for centuries, and we’re just getting really good at it now with our high tech genetics and testing facilities. In fact, many of the new discoveries are from species that we’ve known about and studied since before Carl Linnaeus left Lund.
So, when a species goes extinct, we not only lose the practical benefits now, but all undiscovered benefits in the future (including less practical benefits such as beauty). And it is impossible that we will ever recreate any living laboratory as intricate, diverse and reliable as nature. Scientists are often amazed and confounded by nature, because humans lack the imagination to invent what various species do naturally.
We are about to trade the unknown value of biodiversity for the known value of fossil fuels, when we could save that unknown value for posterity, by simply limiting our exploitation of fossil fuels. Why are the greedy not more interested in preserving future wealth?
As they have in the past, some day in the near future a tiny fish will save the life of a human child, simply due to the little fish’s biodiversity. Unless we kill them all before unlocking their secrets.
Unfortunately for the fang blenny and humans and our descendants (if any), the fang blenny lives, like many undiscovered species, in one of the most endangered coral reef ecosystems on our small blue dot, the Great Barrier Reef.