how many animal species are there?

Answer 1

Nobody knows. They keep finding more and more.

Answer 2

The answer to how many? is how. As the weather of the earth kept changing, new and newer species kept evolving and those that could adapt to the changes stayed (like cockroaches). The process is continuous and is happening even today. As some species are dying forever, new ones are coming up everyday especially among Insects, viruses (some people do not consider them to be living and some consider them highly evolved) and bacteria. So there will never be a fixed number of animal species and many have still not been described or found.

Answer 3

An awful lot!
The funniest thing is, not only do we not know exactly how many species exist; we do not even know exactly how many species we have catalogued.

You would think that you could go to the expert on frogs and say "How many frogs are there?"
then go on to ask the fish expert and the primate expert etc. then just add them all together and get your figure; but because of confusion about what is and what is not a species in every field of taxonomy you cannot even get a straight answer on that.
Everything is an estimate if not a downright guess.

Answer 4

Biologists are still discovering many new species and variants around the world. With the rain forests being so dense and the oceans so deep no one can tell.
After the tsunami a few years ago there were lots of weird creatures washed up onto land. With the rain forests being cut down and also with it being so large and difficult to explore, this is making it difficult to count too.
Sorry if this is not the answer you are looking for but it's the truth, the number so far is too many to count and adding to the list every day!

Answer 5

Just over a million have been described so far.

http://texasnature.blogspot.com/2003/10/how-many-animal-species-exist.html

Answer 6

The definition of species is fairly arbitrary.
For example lions and tigers are labelled as different species, yet they can interbreed - producing tions and ligers.

The false killer whale and dolphin can also interbreed and they are different *genera*.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/271/

It has been estimated that there are/were only about 16,000 basic kinds of animals from which all have descended via natural selection. (Nothing to do with evolution)
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3104

Answer 7

I think they are still discovering new species in the amazon, on a regular basis.

Answer 8

This question has no verifiable answer because the definition of species is a fluid one, which will probably become meaningless, as genomics advances. The evolutionary connectedness of all life will be seamless.