California Has Way More Insect Species Than Anyone Thought. Here’s the New Estimate.
· Vice
California is a big state. You’d expect it to have many different insect species. Since there’s no real way to take a door-to-door census, scientists rely on informed estimates. For a long time, the scientific community assumed California had around 26,000 insect species.
That was extremely wrong. New revised estimates published in the journal Ecography put the number of different insect species in California near 60,000.
Visit sports24.club for more information.
Scientists Just Discovered California Has Way More Insect Species Than Anyone Thought. Here’s the Real Number.
According to a study led by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, scientists have only described about two-thirds of California’s insect residents. That means roughly 35 percent of California’s bugs are running around entirely unaccounted for.
To pull off this massive census, an organization called the California Insect Barcode Initiative dropped $6 million and recruited an army of over 100 volunteers. These dedicated bug counters used bug traps that funnel flying critters into jars of alcohol in 72 different EPA-designated ecoregions and hundreds of expedition sites.
Researchers from UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, the California Academy of Sciences, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture then DNA-barcoded over one million individual specimens.
They found that practically every single site harbored its own distinct insect community. Mountains and deserts, like the Mojave Basin and Range, were loaded with hyper-local species diversity. All this will help future conservation efforts, which usually focus on mammals and birds.
Now, maybe California’s enormous insect population will get their time in the conservation limelight, too.
The post California Has Way More Insect Species Than Anyone Thought. Here’s the New Estimate. appeared first on VICE.