Some fun facts (or factoids?) about the space rock we currently inhabit. From Wikipedia, I believe.
>>>Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms. The total number of extant species is estimated at between six and ten million; potentially over 90% of the animal life forms on Earth are insects.
>>>Insects may be found in nearly all environments, although only a small number of species reside in the oceans, which are dominated by another arthropod group, crustaceans, which recent research has indicated insects are nested within.
>>>In 1982, Terry Erwin published an estimate of global species richness of 30 million, by extrapolating from the numbers of beetles found in a species of tropical tree. In one species of tree, Erwin identified 1,200 beetle species, of which he estimated 163 were found only in that type of tree. Given the 50,000 described tropical tree species, Erwin suggested that there are almost 10 million beetle species in the tropics.
>>>In 2011 a study published in PLoS Biology estimated there to be 8.7 million ± 1.3 million eukaryotic species on Earth. A 2016 study concludes that Earth is home to 1 trillion species.
The good news is that most of that trillion aren´t insects. The bad news is that they are...micro-organisms! Either way, we live on Bug Planet. And God is the Lord of flies.
