Question: How many insects are there all over the world?

John Paterson answered on 21 Jun 2019:

Cool question, this is hard for us to know because of course we haven’t counted all the insects in the world! In fact, we probably haven’t even discovered most of them yet. Insects are the largest and most diverse group of animals we know and currently there are around 900,000 species in the world. This is 80% of all the species in the world, so most of the animals we know are insects! However more are discovered every month and scientists think there might still be hundreds of thousands of species left to find. See this recent article, where someone found 103 new beetle species just this year! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47483157

We don’t know exactly how many insects there are but scientists can calculate guesses by knowing how many insects we find in certain environments and then applying this guess to all the environments in the world. Doing this, scientists think there are as many as 10 quintillion insects in the world. That’s a number so big I’ve never even heard of it before! Apparently a quintillion is a million times a million times a million. So there may be as many as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects in the world. This means there would be about 150 million insects for every one person in the world, which is absolutely crazy.

So basically, there are a lot of insects in the world!