Our Planet is full of With Life of millions of species

Barely 14% of creatures on Earth have been logged in central databases – just 9% of those in the seas, the study noted. And, according to David Kavanaugh, a beetle expert at the California Academy of Science, funding and other resources fall short of the task as research institutions are cutting back, and governments are more preoccupied with finding life on Mars than on Earth.

"The most frustrating this is to realise how little resources go into answering this question," he said. "One of those flights to Mars would fund us for decades in exploring life on this planet," he said. "It is very hard to get any money at all to go out, and yet they can go and blow up a rocket on a launch pad that would have funded my career and that of 100 others."

Most of those species waiting to be discovered will be small, and they are likely to be concentrated in remote areas or the depths of the ocean. But the authors said: "Many could be found literally in our own backyards."

But at the current pace, it would take 300,000 specialists 1,200 years to go through the laborious process of describing the new discoveries in scientific journals, and then entering them in electronic databases. "Describing species is a very time consuming process," said Tittensor. "Although it will be relatively straightforward to find a new species – there are millions of them out there – it is not necessarily an easy process to describe them in scientific literature."

Many of those species will be extinct before scientists have even registered their presence.

Discovering new species

Scientists and conservationists are regularly updating the inventory of life with the discovery of new species. Last week, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution reported the discovery of a primitive eel in a reef off the coast of the South Pacific island nation of Palau. The new species, Protoanguilla palau, bore little relation to 19 other forms of eel currently in existence and some of its characteristics – such as a second upper jaw – were more in line with fossils from 65m years ago.

Other recent highlights, as compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) at Arizona State University, include the eternal light mushroom, or Mycena luxaeterna, which emits bright yellowish light. The new species was collected from forests near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Another highlight was the golden spotted monitor lizard (Varanus bitatawa), a two-metre long beast discovered on Luzon Island in the Philippines. It has evaded earlier discovery by spending most of its time in the trees.

But most scientists expect the next rush of discovery to come from even smaller organisms, such as bacteria. The IISE also highlighted the discovery of a new bacteria growing on the shipwrecked hull of the Titanic. Halomonas titanicae is an iron oxide-eating bacteria, that could eventually eat the wreck up.