We’ve always been pretty sure there are a lot of insects out there. Scientists have long estimated that roughly 10 quintillion individual insects are alive on Earth at any given moment. The assumption, though, was that the number of species making up that swarm was much smaller, around 6 million. Turns out, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we may have been undercounting by several millions.
In the study, the researchers argue that the real number is somewhere between 14 million and 20 million… and maybe even more. But there is a catch: the scientific world is currently only aware of about 1.2 million of them.
That estimate comes to us by way of a DNA analysis of more than 1.6 million insects collected over decades in Costa Rica’s Área de Conservación Guanacaste, one of the world’s most diverse, most studied tropical ecosystems.
Earth May Have Three Times More Insect Species Than Scientists Thought
Using a variety of data-gathering techniques paired with statistical modeling, the team estimates that there are roughly 333,000 insect species in this protected region alone. Scaling those numbers up globally, given everything we know about insect populations and the rest of the world, that means about 93 to 97 percent of insect species may still be completely unknown to science.
This is more than a fun fact that puts into perspective just how outnumbered we are by insects on a planet that we think we dominate. As the University of Connecticut points out, scientists have recently warned of a mass global insect die-off that’s been cheekily referred to as the “insect apocalypse,” spurred by a range of human-driven factors, including habitat destruction, widespread pesticide use, climate change, and even light pollution.
If these new estimates are correct, it could mean that there are countless species out there already disappearing that we didn’t even know existed in the first place. This means there are perhaps thousands, perhaps millions of insect bellwethers out there indicating a looming disaster, and we have no idea that they even existed in the first place.
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