The great insect decline in Argentina
Nicolás Ferreiro
Instituto de Ecología y Desarrollo Sustentable, Universidad Nacional de Luján-CONICET, Luján, Buenos Aires, 6700, Argentina
DOI: https://doi.org/ce.v2i1.7755
Keywords: extinction; species; hyperdiversity; habitat degradation
Abstract
A 41% of arthropod species are declining, and one-third of all species are threatened by extinction. Changes in land use are recognized as the primary cause of this decline. The scarcity of data for the Southern Hemisphere is partly due to limited funding but particularly due to the hyperdiversity of tropical regions. The objective of this study was to investigate the presence of this issue in scientific articles and the contribution of insects to the total number of threatened species in Argentina. Globally, the percentage of articles related to insect extinctions in Google Scholar has grown exponentially over the past twenty years, from 0.42% in 2000 to 6% in 2021. However, no significant growth was found in the number of articles on this topic in Argentina during the study period. Currently, only 23 insect species are recognized as at risk out of a total of 572 threatened species according to the "IUCN Red List of Threatened Species" for Argentina. These species belong to the orders Odonata (8), Coleoptera (1), Lepidoptera (2), Hymenoptera (11), and Orthoptera (1 species), representing only 4% of the total threatened species. In comparison, it is estimated that 26% and 27% of threatened species in the much less diverse faunas of Germany and the United Kingdom, respectively, are insects. These results suggest that the percentage of endangered insects in Argentina is being underestimated due to taxonomic and population knowledge gaps, consistent with reports by other authors. In hyperdiverse countries like ours, only molecular techniques can process large samples quickly enough to obtain estimates of insect diversity before they disappear.
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