Insect biodiversity

Insects make up an enormous share of the described species of life on Earth, accounting for more than half of the roughly 1.5 million organism species that have been formally described. Estimates put the number of described insect species at between 950,000 and 1,000,000, more than half of all known eukaryotes out of about 1.8 million species total, while global models predict as many as 1.5 million beetle species alone and around 5.5 million insect species in all. If that higher total is correct, insects could eventually account for more than 80 percent of all organism species once fully catalogued. Because only about 20,000 new species across all forms of life are described each year, most insect species are likely to remain formally undescribed unless the rate of species description increases substantially. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/