This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: There are an estimated 10 quintillion insects alive on Earth at any given time. That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual insects.
But how many species are there, why do we need them, and what would happen if their numbers continued to fall? Alex Dittrich, a zoologist at Nottingham Trent University, explains why these small creatures play such a big role in keeping our planet functioning. To borrow the words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big.
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is..." While science fiction and entomology rarely occupy the same conversation, this sentiment is surprisingly familiar to entomologists. Replace the vastness of space with the sheer abundance of insects, and the comparison becomes remarkably apt. More than a million insect species have been described, but there are many more left to discover.
Estimates of the total number of insect species range from 5.5 million to over 7 million. To put that into perspective, there are around 6,500 mammal species—the group that includes humans. In comparison, the number of insect species is enormous.
The numbers become even more mind-boggling when we consider individual insects rather than species. The commonly cited estimate is that around 10 quintillion individual insects are alive on Earth at any given time. That is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects.
With more than 8 billion people on the planet, that works out to approximately 1.2 billion insects for every person. That is a lot of insects. But why do we need so many?
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