New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods

Author(s)
Stork, Nigel E
McBroom, James
Gely, Claire
Hamilton, Andrew J
Publication Date
2015-06-16
Abstract
It has been suggested that we do not know within an order of magnitude the number of all species on Earth [May RM (1988) Science 241(4872):1441-1449]. Roughly 1.5 million valid species of all organisms have been named and described [Costello MJ, Wilson S, Houlding B (2012) <i>Syst Biol</i> 61(5):871-883]. Given Kingdom Animalia numerically dominates this list and virtually all terrestrial vertebrates have been described, the question of how many terrestrial species exist is all but reduced to one of how many arthropod species there are. With beetles alone accounting for about 40% of all described arthropod species, the truly pertinent question is how many beetle species exist. Here we present four new and independent estimates of beetle species richness, which produce a mean estimate of 1.5 million beetle species. We argue that the surprisingly narrow range (0.9-2.1 million) of these four autonomous estimates - derived from host-specificity relationships, ratios with other taxa, plant:beetle ratios, and a completely novel body-size approach - represents a major advance in honing in on the richness of this most significant taxon, and is thus of considerable importance to the debate on how many species exist. Using analogous approaches, we also produce independent estimates for all insects, mean: 5.5 million species (range 2.6-7.8 million),and for terrestrial arthropods, mean: 6.8 million species (range5.9-7.8 million), which suggest that estimates for the world's insects and their relatives are narrowing considerably.
Citation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(24), p. 7519-7523
ISSN
1091-6490
0027-8424
Pubmed ID
26034274
Link
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Title
New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods
Type of document
Journal Article
Entity Type
Publication

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