The global diversity of protozoa and other small species

It is widely believed that the number of species of micro-organisms in the world is extremely large. Here, we offer the contrasting view--that the number may be quite modest. Most of the work reviewed refers to the ciliated protozoa. As with all microbial groups, we must define our concept of "species", and for ciliates, the "morphospecies" concept appears to be at least as robust as any other. Critical examination of published descriptions of ciliates provides a "best estimate" of 3744 for the global number of free-living morphospecies. Of these, 793 are associated with marine sediments, and 1370 with freshwater sediments. In an independent analysis based on extrapolation (assuming the ubiquity of species) from ecological datasets, we estimate the numbers of species in marine and freshwater sediments as 597 and 732, respectively (i.e. within a factor of two of the figures obtained from taxonomic analysis). This apparent convergence of independent estimates will strengthen if, as is likely, the number of nominal species is further reduced by taxonomic revision. These relatively low numbers of species are consistent with (a) the vast amount of published information indicating typically cosmopolitan distributions for ciliates and other microbes, and (b) recent experimental evidence that most free-living ciliates are rare or cryptic--seldom detectable, but present, and "waiting" for suitable conditions to arrive. In summary, most ciliates (and other micro-organisms) are probably ubiquitous, endemics are rare, global species richness is relatively low, and, at least in the case of the ciliates, most species have already been discovered.