Scientists Say We Need to Save The World's Parasites Before We Lose Them Forever - ScienceAlert

"Found throughout the tree of life and in every ecosystem, parasites are some of the most diverse, ecologically important animals on Earth - but in almost all cases, the least protected by wildlife or ecosystem conservation efforts," the authors explain in their paper.

"Our working group identified 12 goals for the next decade that could advance parasite biodiversity conservation through an ambitious mix of research, advocacy, and management.".

As the team explains, cuddly or charismatic animals get the bulk of funding when it comes to conservation, and we've only identified around 10 percent of the parasites that inhabit them.

"Some targets will be difficult to estimate, and initial estimates will have wide confidence intervals, especially for groups like parasites of invertebrate hosts that are under described and under-represented in biodiversity data.

Even so, systematically using the best-available methods to define initial 50 percent description targets will vastly improve our understanding of global parasite biodiversity.".

Just a note here that the team isn't focused on human or domesticated animal parasites – so you don't need to worry about them formally protecting the ring worm, ticks, or lice we all know and love (or hate)

"Fully describing 50 percent of parasite biodiversity, like all the other goals identified here, could be dismissed as overly ambitious and too low priority given the many fronts on which resources for combatting global change biology are already spread thin," the team writes