Quantifying Uncertainty in Estimation of Tropical Arthropod Species Richness

Hamilton, Andrew J.; Basset, Yves; Benke, Kurt K.; Grimbacher, Peter S.; Miller, Scott E.; Novotný, Vojtěch; Samuelson, G. A.; Stork, Nigel E.; Weiblen, George D.; Yen, Jian D. L.

doi:10.1086/652998

Cited by 203 publications

(174 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Method 1: The host specificity of insects to trees (8,17,18) has been recently reexamined (19,20) and here, using the same modeling, we provide estimates for beetles alone. Method 2: The ratio of butterflies to other insects in the British fauna scaled up using estimates for all butterflies in the world (21) has been updated here using new estimates of the British insects (22) to give estimates for beetles and insects of the world.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods

Stork

McBroom

Gely

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

362

256

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It has been suggested that we do not know within an order of magnitude the number of all species on Earth [May RM (1988) Science 241(4872):1441-1449]. Roughly 1.5 million valid species of all organisms have been named and described [Costello MJ, Wilson S, Houlding B (2012) Syst Biol 61(5):871-883]. Given Kingdom Animalia numerically dominates this list and virtually all terrestrial vertebrates have been described, the question of how many terrestrial species exist is all but reduced to one of how many arthropod species there are. With beetles alone accounting for about 40% of all described arthropod species, the truly pertinent question is how many beetle species exist. Here we present four new and independent estimates of beetle species richness, which produce a mean estimate of 1.5 million beetle species. We argue that the surprisingly narrow range (0.9-2.1 million) of these four autonomous estimates-derived from host-specificity relationships, ratios with other taxa, plant:beetle ratios, and a completely novel body-size approach-represents a major advance in honing in on the richness of this most significant taxon, and is thus of considerable importance to the debate on how many species exist. Using analogous approaches, we also produce independent estimates for all insects, mean: 5.5 million species (range 2.6-7.8 million), and for terrestrial arthropods, mean: 6.8 million species (range 5.9-7.8 million), which suggest that estimates for the world's insects and their relatives are narrowing considerably.biodiversity | body size | Coleoptera | species richness B eetles account for roughly 25% (350,000-400,000 species)(1) of all described species (∼1.5 million species), making this the most species-rich order known on Earth and supporting the philosopher Haldane's famous observation that God has "an inordinate fondness for beetles" (2, 3). Therefore, because this is a single lineage, an understanding of their global species richness, and that of the insects and other arthropods of which they form a part, is particularly important. There have been several reviews that discuss the merits of different estimates of the species richness for these taxa as well as of other organisms (1, 4-9), but none have been able to use these to derive mean estimates with some measure of error associated with these means. Here we compare global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods from eight different methods of estimation (here called methods 1-8). One of these (method 8) we introduce here, called the "body size and year of description" method, is based on the observed tendency for larger species of organisms to be described and named before smaller species, resulting in a decline in the mean body size of named species over time (10,11). We use data for beetles from the Natural History Museum (NHM) world collection in London and the British fauna to test this method. There has been some discussion as to whether global species estimates are converging (12) or not (13), and here we test this further. M...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods

Stork

McBroom

Gely

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

362

256

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“…Terrestrial food webs of plants, herbivores and their natural enemies harbour much of global biodiversity (Hamilton et al 2010;Price 2002), including many parasitoids (Godfray 1994;Quicke 1997). Understanding of the mechanisms maintaining this enormous diversity requires quantitative data on host-parasitoid food webs, especially from the tropics where these food webs are poorly known (Godfray et al 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parasitism rate, parasitoid community composition and host specificity on exposed and semi-concealed caterpillars from a tropical rainforest

et al. 2013

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The processes maintaining the enormous diversity of herbivore-parasitoid food webs depend on parasitism rate and parasitoid host specificity. The two parameters have to be evaluated in concert to make conclusions about the importance of parasitoids as natural enemies and guide biological control. We document parasitism rate and host specificity in a highly diverse caterpillar-parasitoid food web encompassing 266 species of lepidopteran hosts and 172 species of hymenopteran or dipteran parasitoids from a lowland tropical forest in Papua New Guinea. We found that semi-concealed hosts (leaf rollers and leaf tiers) represented 84 % of all caterpillars, suffered a higher parasitism rate than exposed caterpillars (12 vs. 5 %) and their parasitoids were also more host specific. Semi-concealed hosts may therefore be generally more amenable to biological control by parasitoids than exposed ones. Parasitoid host specificity was highest in Braconidae, lower in Diptera: Tachinidae, and, unexpectedly, the lowest in Ichneumonidae. This result challenges the long-standing view of low host specificity in caterpillar-attacking Tachinidae and suggests higher suitability of Braconidae and lower suitability of Ichneumonidae for biological control of caterpillars. Semi-concealed hosts and their parasitoids are the largest, yet understudied component of caterpillar-parasitoid food webs. However, they still remain much closer in parasitism patterns to exposed hosts than to what literature reports on fully concealed leaf miners. Specifically, semi-concealed hosts keep an equally low share of idiobionts (2 %) as exposed caterpillars.

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“…However, even after more than 250 years of taxonomic study the increasing number of taxonomists is not enough to allow estimation of how many species there are still left to be discovered in speciose but less-well studied taxa such as beetles [9] and parasitic wasps, two groups that comprise a major fraction of all the species on earth [10]. It is commonly agreed that at current rates of extinction, many species will die out before they are described by science [3,11].…”

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confidence: 99%

Still not enough taxonomists: reply to Joppa et al.

Bacher

2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

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Quantifying Uncertainty in Estimation of Tropical Arthropod Species Richness

Cited by 203 publications

References 27 publications

New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods

New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods

Parasitism rate, parasitoid community composition and host specificity on exposed and semi-concealed caterpillars from a tropical rainforest

Still not enough taxonomists: reply to Joppa et al.

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