Article Summary 2 Outline

Name: Kortnee Gray Presentation Date March 18

Find an article relating to biological anthropology from a scientific peer-reviewed journal and complete the first (Original source) and second (Reflection) parts of the outline. Find a second source related to your first and complete the third part of the outline (Related source). This may be a popular review of the original source. Limited responses will not receive full credit. More detailed instructions and links to resources are posted in Canvas. This outline should be completed and turned in on the day you present to the class and it will be used for grading the assignment. Additionally, submit the summary portions only in Canvas. No late work will be accepted.

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1. Original source: a. Title: How Many Species are there on Earth and in the Ocean? b. Author(s): Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm c. Authors credentials: All of the authors are affiliated with the Department of Biology Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova, Scotia, and Canada. d. Source (complete reference): Public Library of Science, PLOS Biology: How Many Species are there on Earth and in the Ocean? e. Summary (note that the summary length should be commensurate with the article length and should be in narrative (paragraph) format and that an in-text citation is required). This summary should identify the research topic, hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusion: -In the article How Many Species are there on Earth and in the Ocean? the authors begin their article with Robert May recently noted that if aliens visited our planet, one of their first questions would be How many distinct life formsspeciesdoes your planet have? He also pointed out that we would be embarrassed by the uncertainty in our answer. Going about finding how many species there are on this earth and in the ocean is extremely difficult because of the biodiversity the world has. Since there are so many in the world today is so large, in order to start documenting the species the scientists would classify the the species into their taxonomic groups and into their higher taxonomic groups. Because of the increasing higher taxonomic ranks the estimation of the number of the species was growing. In order to get a record of the correct group the scientists had to begin classifying the species from phylum to genus. They then would go through a big process involving many formulas in order to obtain the asymptotic number for each taxonomic level. Because of this scientists were able to get a rough estimate of the number of species living on the world and in the ocean today. There is roughly 8.7 millions species on earth and 2.2 million of them being marine. f. Critical evaluation (what makes this source credible? Why should this information be believed?): -The site that I found this article on looked like a very

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good website. Like all the information on it would be credible. But thats judging a book by a cover and I couldnt go off of that. While I was reading my article the information that was provided and going to do more research on the article itself made me realize that it is a credible article. Because of the authors that wrote the article and they layout of the article beginning with a brief summery of what they will be talking on, giving visual evidence of what they are explaining, and going into detail about their findings made this source very credible to be. 1 ____ g. Relevance to biological anthropology: -Biological anthropology covers the topics of genetics, evolutionary biology, nutrition, physiological adaption, and growth and development. Because of the growing numbers of the species on the earth and in the ocean it fits in with biological anthropology. The study was looking into the origin of the species and how they fit in with the world today. h. Other disciplines touched upon:

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i. In one sentence, summarize the main point of the article: the take-away message. -Because of how many species there are on the earth it is hard to get an exact count of them all, but because of all the taxonomists and recent studies scientists have been able to get a rough count of a total of ~8.7 million. 2. Reflection a. Which part of this assignment was most difficult and why? -Reading the article was the hardest part for me. As I was reading the article I kept getting sidetracked. It was very hard for me to follow along with. I kept reading though because it is a very interesting topic. When reading a very scientific article that has words in there that Im not familiar with, it was hard to really understand what the authors were talking about. This made it a lot harder to really understand the whole article, but after a couple of times reading it I finally was able to understand it. b. Identify at least one question you have after reading the original article and explain how you could go about finding an answer. -One question I had while reading this article is how they keep track of all the species that have been counted. There are so many out there and how do they know if it has not already been classified and counted as a species? Or if another scientist has already classified it? One way of going about finding the answers to these questions is by simply typing it into google. Finding the answer to my question this way would give me many different articles giving me the answer yes or no and explaining why. One way I could narrower it down to get a credible source is by making sure to have key words in the search engine or going about the same article and going off of sources the authors used for their article. c. Reflect on how the critical evaluation process impacted your opinion on the article. -The critical thinking process of this article allowed me to look into the article. To really think about it. Because of the critical thinking process my impression now is much different then my first impression of right after reading the article. I didnt have all these different questions I had to really think about

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and present about the article. In doing so, it has changed my thoughts of being naive and believing everything to questioning the article and certain things it was telling us. d. How might the information in the article be useful in the future? This might be answered very broadly such as how an understanding of larger biological principles might be useful. -This article is a beginning article of many more out there and many more studies. The supporting material they produced with their findings made it so much more easier to understand what they were meaning in their article. It gave you an idea on how to go about counting all of the species. This article can help many scientist out in the world in the beginning stages of how to start counting and how many species have already been counted. 3. Related source .5 ____ .5 ____ .5 ____ a. Title: Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss? b. Author(s): Robert M. May c. Authors credentials: Robert M. May is affiliated with the Zoology Department, Oxford University, and the United Kingdom d. Complete reference: PLOS Biology. Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss? 3 ____ e. Summary (note that the summary length should be commensurate with the article length and should be in narrative (paragraph) format and that an in-text citation is required): -Why worry about how many species we have on the earth? Does knowing their taxonomic class really affect us as a whole? In the article Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss Robert M. May states It is a remarkable testament to humanitys narcissism that we know the number of books in the US Library of Congress but cannot tell youto within an order-ofmagnitudehow many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with. May has a point, how can we live on a planet and not know what else if living on here too? With a rough total of 8.7 million species and having 2.2 million be marine it is extremely hard to classify each and every organism. The collecting of information on the species and classifying them into their correct taxonomic group takes time. With a rough amount of 15,000 species being classified each year it would take up to 1.5 million years to classify each species. It makes you wonder if it is really worth it. But because us humans rely on the many of these species output to live it is extremely worth it to classify each specie. Because of specific things happening in the world, it would be in out best favor to know each and every specie out there. f. Critical evaluation (what makes this source credible? Why should this information be believed?): -I found this article in a link from my previous article. I thought it would be a good one because it is going from the complete opposite angle from my previous article. I know it is a credible source because of all the information that was presented up front about the article and the author. g. Relevance to chosen article: -This article is the sister article to the previous one I read. From the previous article it discusses that there are roughly about 8.7

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million species on earth and that we have only classified a very small portion of them. This article is talking about the complete opposite and why should we classify them if there are so many.

Works Cited on Mora C, Tittensor DP, Adl S, Simpson AGB, Worm B (2011) How Many Species Are There Earth and in the Ocean? PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001127. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio. 1001127 May RM (2011) Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss? PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001130. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001130