Insects are absolutely everywhere. In fact, there are over one billion for every single human on Earth. While that may sound like a nightmare for some people, without insects we would have no future. “If we were to wipe out insects…” E.O. Wilson warns, “...the rest of life, and humanity with it, would mostly disappear...”
Despite their dominance of our planet, insects were trumped by birds when it came to sightings by QuestaGamers last year (see our Top 10 birds here). They did come in a close second though, making up 1 in 4 of all sightings. So let’s take a look at the top 10 most commonly sighted insects, including some great images from our bug loving players. (Please note that It can be quite hard to identify insects to their specific species, so we’ve based this on ‘families’, or groups of species.)
Kicking off our top 10, we have a very tight tussle between Praying mantises and Swallowtail butterflies!
Clearly QuestaGamers have been drawn in by the beautiful colours and diverse forms of butterflies and moths. Their branch of the tree of life, the order Lepidoptera, has absolutely dominated this top 10 - making up half the list!
But will they continue to dominate? With ten quintillion individual insects thought to be out there (that's a 1 followed by 19 zeros - 10,000,000,000,000,000,000!!), there is going to be no shortage of competition. Here at QuestaGame we're looking forward to featuring all the amazing finds along the way. Keep them coming!
Team QG