The dragonfly that perches delicately on your foot as you drift on the lake. The mosquito you swat at around the campfire. The ants that march your cracker crumbs away. The bees that produced your delicious wildflower honey.

We are surrounded by thousands of insects every day, some of them buzzing in our face, others almost invisible to our eyes.

They come in a wild variety of shapes, sizes and colours. And they perform a diversity of jobs, many of them essential to the sustainability of our ecosystem — from pollinating flowers to controlling garden pests, aerating soil and decomposing waste.

Taxonomists have discovered and described about one million insect species so far. Until now, the general consensus was that there must be around five to six million insect species in total on Earth, with some entomologists criticizing this number as too low.

Our new research reveals that this number was a vast underestimation. There are in fact anywhere between 13.3 million and 24.7 million insect species on Earth.

The challenge of estimation

In 1735, Carl Linneaus established a system of ranked biological classification that has........

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