Has a company really discovered a million new species?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: More or Less – "Has a company really discovered a million new species?"

Host: Tom Coles
Guests: Dr. Oliver Vince (Basecamp Research), Rob Finn (European Bioinformatics Institute)
Date: February 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of More or Less, hosted by Tom Coles, investigates a headline-grabbing claim: that a company, Basecamp Research, has discovered over a million new species. Listener Vivian prompted the show to examine whether this number stands up to scrutiny. Through interviews with Dr. Oliver Vince (Basecamp Research) and Rob Finn (European Bioinformatics Institute), Tom dissects what this claim actually means, how such discoveries are made, and what counts as a "species" in this context.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Claim: A Million New Species

• Dr. Oliver Vince of Basecamp Research claims they have discovered “over a million new species” through global partnerships and biological exploration.
  • Quote (01:49):
    Dr. Oliver Vince: “Far more than 99% of life on Earth is completely unknown... We’ve built partnerships in 28 countries, 150 different locations... So far, we’ve discovered over a million new species.”

2. Is This What We Imagine as "Species Discovery"?

• Host Tom Coles questions if these are the traditional new species — plants, animals, etc.
• Rob Finn clarifies (03:00):
  • The “species” discovered are not large organisms, but microbes — specifically bacteria, which are invisible to the naked eye.

3. The Sheer Scale of Microbial Diversity

• There’s an astronomical number of bacteria on Earth:
  • Quote (03:39):
    Rob Finn: “It’s estimated there’s about a trillion different [bacterial] species, which is the same number as there are stars in the Milky Way.”

4. How Were These Species “Discovered”?

• It’s not by growing bacteria in labs, but via DNA sequencing from environmental samples (soil, water, etc.) (04:37–06:27).
  • Steps include:
    • Collecting samples (e.g. liters of seawater, mud)
    • Filtering out microbes
    • Breaking open cells to get a “DNA soup”
    • Sequencing DNA en masse
    • Using computers to reassemble genome fragments like a “giant jigsaw puzzle”
  • Quote (05:56):
    Rob Finn: “You literally whizz it up... you are essentially putting it in a blitzer, but in a gentle way.”

5. Defining a Species in Microbial Terms

• Traditional species definitions (breeding, appearance) don’t apply to bacteria (07:07).
• Scientists use DNA similarity: two bacteria are usually considered separate species if their genomes are <95% identical (08:14).
  • Quote (08:14):
    Rob Finn: “If they are greater than 95% identical, that’s the rule of thumb, then we would consider them to be the same species.”

6. Is the "Million Species" Claim Credible?

• Rob Finn confirms the number is plausible based on methods and environments sampled (08:54).
  • Quote (08:54):
    Rob Finn: “It is exactly that, right ballpark. I might have done it differently, but it's there or thereabouts.”

7. The Abstract Nature of This Discovery

• The new species “exist” only as DNA sequences; no one has seen or grown them (09:08–09:30).
• The method destroys the original samples — you find new species by destroying them.
  • Memorable moment (09:37):
    Tom Coles: “So they’re technically finding new species only by destroying them, which seems, how can I put it, suboptimal.”
• However, Rob Finn sees value for medicine and AI research, as the resulting DNA data can be analyzed for new drugs or scientific purposes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Rob Finn (03:39): “There are a lot of bacteria out there... about a trillion different species, which is the same number of stars as there are in the Milky Way.”
• Rob Finn (05:34): “You whizz it up. You literally whizz it up... but in a gentle way.”
• Rob Finn (08:14): “If they are greater than 95% identical, that’s the rule of thumb, then we’d consider them to be the same species.”
• Rob Finn (08:54): “It is exactly that, right ballpark. I might have done it differently, but it’s there or thereabouts.”
• Tom Coles (09:37): “So they’re technically finding new species only by destroying them, which seems, how can I put it, suboptimal.”
• Rob Finn (09:48): “I think there’ll be some interesting discoveries, no doubt, and it’s a great dataset for them to exploit and for us to investigate collectively as scientists.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:49] – Dr. Oliver Vince makes the million species discovery claim
• [03:00] – Explanation: “new species” means new bacteria, not animals/plants
• [03:39] – The vastness of microbial diversity
• [04:37–06:27] – How DNA sequencing reveals new species from environmental samples
• [07:07–08:37] – How species status is determined by DNA similarity in microbes
• [08:54] – Independent verification of the plausibility of the 1 million count
• [09:08–09:48] – The philosophical takeaway: the “species” are digital, not organismal

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode maintains a curious and gently skeptical tone. Tom Coles and his expert guest demystify the headline, showing that “new species” doesn't mean colorful new animals but rather unseen bacteria known only as strings of data. The million-species claim is technically feasible within this context, but it reflects how scientific definitions and discovery methods shift with technology. Ultimately, while those species won’t be named in field guides or seen with the naked eye, the DNA data could lead to meaningful discoveries in medicine and science.

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Transcript

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[Tom Coles]

Hello and thanks for downloading the More or less podcast. We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news, in life and in DNA databases. Hello, I'm Tom Coles. How many new species are out there waiting to be discovered? Quite a few, according to a claim that loyal listener Vivian heard in a BBC interview and wanted us to look into. Here's Dr. Oliver Vince, co founder of a company called Basecamp Research, speaking to the Today programme.

[Dr. Oliver Vince]

Far more than 99% of life on Earth is completely unknown. And so Basecamp set out to change this. We've built partnerships in 28 countries, 150 different locations, that is, you know, the rainforest, the Arctic, volcanoes under the ocean, to basically look for the rest of the species. So far, we've discovered over a million new species.

[Tom Coles]

A million new species. That does sound exciting. It also sounds like an awfully big number. Can it really be right?

[Rob Finn]

So, my name's Rob Finn. I work at the European Bioinformatics Institute. We are the custodians of the world's biological data. So we try and gather it all up and put it into databases and then make it freely available for the scientific community to use in their research.

[Tom Coles]

Although they do things in a Different way and not for profit. Rob's databases are similar to the one being created by Basecamp Research, so he knows what this claim is all about. First things first, are we talking here about the discovery of a colourful new species of frog or bird or a mysterious new plant?

[Rob Finn]

No, is the short answer. Most of the times we talk about species, you're thinking about a large organism that you can see, like a plant or an animal. However, what they're talking about are microbes, so things that you can't see with the naked eye you need a microscope to see.

[Tom Coles]

These million new species are bacteria, microscopic single cell organisms which multiply by dividing themselves in half. The bacteria you might have heard of, for all of the wrong reasons, are E. Coli and Salmonella, which cause upset stomachs. But that is just the tip of a very big iceberg of very small things.

[Rob Finn]

There are a lot of bacteria out there. It's estimated there's about a trillion different species, which is the same number of stars as there are in the Milky Way. So there's a lot out there to be discovered.

[Tom Coles]

So the species bit is not what you might imagine if someone told you they'd discovered a new species. But the discovery bit is also not what you might imagine. You might think it involves thousands of scientists growing colonies of interesting microbes in little dishes and then watching them multiple multiply through microscopes. But that's not how these species were discovered. The method scientists use is based around that special stuff that contains the blueprint for the organism. It's DNA. Every microbe has its own genome, a long sequence of DNA subdivided into small sections called genes, and you can use the genome to identify the organism.

[Rob Finn]

With DNA sequencing getting cheaper and cheaper, and computational approaches getting better, what we can now do is take environmental samples where you might have hundreds of different bacteria growing, and we can sequence those all together.

[Tom Coles]

Basically, you scoop up water, mud or ice at the location you're interested in and then process the DNA you find there in bulk.

[Rob Finn]

So if you want to go and study the bacteria living in a marine environment, what you can do is you can take, for example, five liters of water and then you filter that through a really, really fine filter. So the water passes through, but all the microbes get caught up on this filter paper then.

[Tom Coles]

And please don't try this with other species.

[Rob Finn]

You whizz it up. You literally whizz it up. You can either use sonication, but that tends to break down the DNA, or you can use a very gentle beating system that, that breaks open the cells. So you are essentially putting it in a blitzer and whizzing it up, but in a gentle way.

[Tom Coles]

You pop open all of those single cell organisms and make a kind of

[Rob Finn]

DNA soup, and then we can pass those through a DNA sequencer that reads off their genetic code.

[Tom Coles]

You turn the physical soup into a data soup in which those long strands of DNA are broken up into tiny fragments all mixed in together.

[Rob Finn]

It's like giant jigsaw puzzles. And we have many different jigsaw puzzles that we must piece together again, and we use computational approaches just because of the size of the data sets and the complexity of the problem.

[Tom Coles]

I'm going to oversimplify an incredibly complicated process here, but there are rules and patterns in DNA. You can take that jumble of puzzle pieces and use computing power to start to identify the pieces that fit together. You end up digitally reconstructing the genomes, at least in part of the original organisms that you started with. Okay, you've collected the samples, made a DNA data soup, and identified the genomes of different organisms. Final part of the puzzle, how do you know that these genomes represent different species?

[Rob Finn]

So in animals and plants, there's quite a nice definition about how you want to sort of talk about an individual species. So we understand species in the fact that they can interbreed in nature and produce fertile offspring.

[Tom Coles]

A horse and a donkey, for example, are different species, but can still mate. They produce a mule as offspring, but mules cannot have babies themselves. Also, horses and donkeys look and sound very different.

[Rob Finn]

The problem is, is that, first of all, bacteria do not breed in the same way that these large organisms, and there are so many of them that it becomes very difficult to look at every single one of them and come up with some characteristic that says, oh, this is this particular organism and this is another organism.

[Tom Coles]

Instead of using breeding and observable characteristics, biologists use statistics to calculate how many species they found.

[Rob Finn]

If we have two different genomes, and then we can compare them so we can basically line up the two strands of DNA and then we can say, how similar are they? So if they are greater than 95% identical, that's the rule of thumb, then we would consider them to be the same species.

[Tom Coles]

Now, depending on what exact percentage you use in this analysis, you get a slightly different number of species. But overall, Rob says that while it's hard to Check precisely the 1 million species calculation from basecamp research looks in the right ballpark.

[Rob Finn]

I think it's perfectly feasible from what they've done, the environments they've gone into and how they've done it. It is exactly that, right ballpark. I might have done it differently, but it's. It's there or thereabouts.

[Tom Coles]

The strange thing about this process where you turn living organisms into data, is that the species only exist in quite an abstract sense. It might be useful for training an AI system on genetic code and potentially finding new and powerful medicines, but no one's actually seeing these species of bacteria alive or growing them in a lab.

[Rob Finn]

The approach of taking everything and then whizzing it up actually destroys the sample.

[Tom Coles]

So they're technically finding new species only by destroying them, which seems, how can I put it, suboptimal. But Rob thinks it's all worth it.

[Rob Finn]

I think there'll be some interesting discoveries, no doubt, and it's a great data set for them to exploit and for us to investigate collectively as scientists.

[Tom Coles]

Thanks to Rob Fenn. That's it for this week. If you've seen a number you think we should take a look at, email us on more or lessbc.co.uk until next week. Goodbye.

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