Won’t somebody please think of the insects?!
Enlarge / This butterfly is also referred to as the Cairns Birdwing. (credit: Jodi Jacobson)
Nearly 17 percent, or 22.5 million square kilometers, of the world's land now falls within protected areas. Countries have established laws that safeguard these parcels of land-or in some cases, aquatic areas-to ensure that the natural ecosystems and their respective species and functions remain in good health. Creating protected areas has clearly helped some species, like the Asian elephant, survive.
But protected areas around the globe-at least as they stood in 2019-are failing to account for some of the world's smallest, most vulnerable, and most fundamentally icky denizens: insects. New research sheds light on this issue, suggesting more than three-quarters of known insect species are not adequately protected by current dedicated conservation areas.
According to Shawan Chowdhury, a conservation biologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and one of the paper's authors, there are also likely many more species of creepy crawlies we don't know about and that are likely also being failed by existing protected areas.