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Earth Might Be Home to 20 Million Insect Species—More Than Three Times as Many as Previously Thought, a Study Suggests
Key takeaways
- Alexey Protasov via Getty Images Insects are among the most numerous and diverse organisms on our planet.
- Entomologists have recently been working with an estimate of about six million insect species around the globe.
- In 2017, researchers reported that flying insect biomass in protected areas of Germany plummeted by more than 75 percent from 1989 to 2016.
Alexey Protasov via Getty Images 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.