Locust swarms are said to hold up to one billion individuals. A South American termite nest was found to have 3 million individuals. An ant nest in Jamaica was calculated to include 630,000 individuals. Even specific insect species have been found to be quite numerous, with calculations of from 3 to 25 million per acre for wireworms (larvae of click beetles).Ĭertain social insects have large numbers in their nests. A similar study in Pennsylvania yielded figures of 425 million animals per acre, with 209 million mites, 119 million springtails, and 11 million other arthropods. In North Carolina, soil samples to a depth of 5 inches yielded a calculation that there were approximately 124 million animals per acre, of which 90 million were mites, 28 million were springtails, and 4.5 million were other insects.
Several enlightening studies have been conducted involving the numbers of individual insects in a given area. fall into four insect Orders: Coleoptera (beetles) at 23,700, Diptera (flies) at 19,600, Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps) at 17,500, and Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) at 11,500. The largest numbers of described species in the U.S. The undescribed species of insects in the United States, however, is estimated at some 73,000.
In the United States, the number of described species is approximately 91,000. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive. Insects also probably have the largest biomass of the terrestrial animals. From studies conducted by Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Entomology in Latin American forest canopies, the number of living species of insects has been estimated to be 30 million. In the last decade, much attention has been given to the entomofauna that exists in the canopies of tropical forests of the world. Conservative estimates suggest that this figure is 2 million, but estimates extend to 30 million. Most authorities agree that there are more insect species that have not been described (named by science) than there are insect species that have been previously named. The true figure of living species of insects can only be estimated from present and past studies. This representation approximates 80 percent of the world's species. In the world, some 900 thousand different kinds of living insects are known. It has long been recognized and documented that insects are the most diverse group of organisms, meaning that the numbers of species of insects are more than any other group.