There may be 3 times as many insect species than previously thought

Get out your bug repellant! A new estimate of insect species globally finds that there may be 8 to 14 million more species than people thought, with few of them discovered.

Most experts have currently accepted an estimate of about 6 million insect species, an appraisal that has stood for the last 40 years. But the new count, which used genetic information for 1.6 million individual tropical insects, a census of a highly diverse group of parasitoid wasps in Costa Rica, and statistical strategies, conservatively estimates the total number of insect species at closer to 14 to 20 million.

The study, published June 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims that a doubling or tripling of estimated insect species - already established as the most diverse group of animals - has profound implications for understanding the scale, richness and future of biodiversity on Earth.

"We cannot protect species if we don't know that they exist, and so to be able to understand the biodiversity on our planet, it's important to know how many there are," said Laura Melissa Guzman, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the paper's corresponding author.