Earth Might Be Home to 20 Million Insect Species—More Than Three Times as Many as Previously Thought, a Study Suggests
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Earth Might Be Home to 20 Million Insect Species—More Than Three Times as Many as Previously Thought…
Scientists Thought Earth Had 6 Million Insect Species. A New Study Says It May Be Three Times More
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Insects are among the most numerous and diverse organisms on our planet.
Practically no corner of Earth is free of the critters—even our southernmost continent has its own native insect, the Antarctic midge. Entomologists have recently been working with an estimate of about six million insect species around the globe. But new research has upended that consensus.
Earth actually hosts between 14 million and 20 million insect species, scientists report in a study published on June 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Only about one million species have been named and described, meaning up to 95 percent of the planet’s insect diversity might remain a mystery. The new work “helps us understand how much we could be losing, and that we have to keep studying these insects to better protect them,” Laura Melissa Guzman, a study co-author and an entomologist at Cornell University, tells Science News’ Erin Garcia de Jesús.
Insect populations have been rapidly declining in recent years, a mostly human-caused phenomenon dubbed the “insect apocalypse.” For instance, a study published in 2014 that examined long-term monitoring of 452 invertebrate species—most of which are insects—found that their global population has dropped by about 45 percent from 1970 to 2010. In 2017, researchers reported that flying insect biomass in protected areas of Germany plummeted by more than 75 percent from 1989 to 2016. “If we don’t even know that a species of insect exists, and we don’t even have a name or anything for it, we could be losing a lot of species” without knowing it, Guzman tells Time’s Jeffrey Kluger.
So, she and her colleagues examined species within the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a 418,000-acre UNESCO World Heritage Site in Costa Rica that sprawls across the country from the Pacific coast to the rainforests of the Caribbean basin. The ACG teems with an array of insect life, but the scientists focused on highly specialized parasitic wasps that belong to a group called Microgastrinae. The vicious critters lay eggs inside living caterpillars, which are consumed inside out by the wasp larvae after hatching.
Since these wasps have been well studied and are heavily cataloged, the team used them as an ecological yardstick to estimate the missing insect species within the ACG, which could then be extrapolated to global populations. The team studied data from creatures caught over several years in 15 Malaise traps—tent-like fabric nets that intercept insects mid-flight, funneling them upward into ethanol-filled bottles that instantly kill and preserve them. Among the more than 1.6 million captured critters, there were about 54,000 known insect species of all varieties.
“Remember that not every species gets caught in a Malaise trap, and they were only in three different parts of the forest,” Guzman tells Time. To account for overlooked wasps, the researchers used statistical methods that can balance uneven datasets. By comparing the fraction of species trapped in the nets to those flying under the radar, computer simulations projected that the ACG harbors about 2,400 Microgastrinae wasp species and 333,000 insect species overall.
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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Environment → Animals We may be losing countless insect species before scientists even know they exist Insects may be far more numerous than anyone thought. A new study estimates that Earth holds 14 million to 20 million insect species, far above the long-standing estimate of about 6 million. It follows that scientists have named only a small fraction of the planet’s most diverse animals, even as reports warn that many insect populations are shrinking.
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