Stork 2007

Stork NE. 2007. World of insects. Nature 448: 657-658.

This is a “News & Views” article in the August 9 2007 issue of Nature, summarizing and contrasting papers in that issue by Novotny et al. (2007) and Dyer et al. (2007).

Novotny et al. (2007) found low beta diversity, few barriers to dispersal, and low host specificity in tropical insects (primarily caterpillars) in Papua New Guinea. Dyer et al. (2007) found higher host specificity of caterpillars in tropical than in temperate South and North America. These apparently contradictory results are described by this author as requiring explanation derived from further large-scale, highly-cooperative studies in a similar vein as these described studies.

While I agree with this broad conclusion, I found this article somewhat annoying. An early section claims, without references, that up to 95% of insect species remain undescribed. However, Novotny et al. (2007) extensively discuss what they view as widely-publicized overestimates of global insect species richness, and suggest that total estimates should be revised downward from their currently-popular level of 10 million. A later section in Stork (2007) is little more than a rambling call for greater sampling effort of insects, other invertebrates, and other eukaryotes, particularly fungi, ending with a mention of the mid-domain “theory” (Colwell and Hartt, 1994); I was under the impression it was the mid-domain “hypothesis”, and was a useful null model for testing some large-scale biogeographic patterns.