It’s true that there are more insects on Earth than any other animal. They make up roughly 80 percent of the planet’s animals and include about 900,000 known species. However, those jaw-dropping numbers can make it easy to undercount our six-legged friends. Take the state of California. Over 60,000 different species of insects reside in the Golden State, and scientists have only described about two-thirds of them. A study published today in the journal Ecography details the findings, which represents a huge bump in the estimated number of insects in California.
The study is part of the California Insect Barcode Initiative (CIBI), a $6 million project to collect and identify every species of insect in the state. Multiple institutions including the California Department of Food and Agriculture, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, San Diego Natural History Museum, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) worked together to DNA barcode over one million insect specimens.
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