Here is a number that should not be possible. Roughly a quarter of every insect observation held in the world’s biggest biodiversity database comes from the United Kingdom. Not from Brazil, which contains a fifth of the Amazon. Not from Indonesia, which has more islands than most people can name. From one cool, damp, thoroughly surveyed island group off the northwest coast of Europe, a place with fewer than sixty species of butterfly, in a world that has tens of thousands.
Meanwhile more than eighty per cent of all insect species on Earth live in the tropics.
That gap is the subject of a paper published in the journal BioScience earlier this month by a team of researchers spread across eight countries, led by Dr Shawan Chowdhury at Monash University in Australia, with Krushnamegh Kunte of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India among the senior authors. Their argument is not that anyone did anything wrong in Britain. British naturalists have been counting moths and beetles in their gardens for the better part of two centuries, and the resulting record is one of the great unglamorous achievements of amateur science. The argument is about what happens when that record becomes the default picture of insect life for the entire planet.
To understand why that number is so lopsided, it helps to know how the British record came to exist. It was not built by a government programme. It was built by clergymen with butterfly nets, by factory workers who ran moth traps in the back garden, by schoolteachers and railway clerks and retired accountants who kept notebooks for fifty years and then left them to a museum. Britain industrialised early, it had a leisured middle class with a hobby, and natural history became something ordinary people did on Sundays. Two centuries of that habit, digitised, is what a quarter of the world’s insect record looks like.
It is easy to check the claim yourself, and I did. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, usually shortened to GBIF, is the open database where museums, universities, government agencies and citizen science apps pool their records. It is the closest thing the planet has to a single ledger of what lives where, and it is what sits underneath an enormous amount of applied conservation work: extinction risk assessments, protected area design, environmental impact reports, the range maps in the back of field guides. Ask it how many insect occurrence records it holds worldwide and the answer comes back at around 340 million. Ask how many of those come from the United Kingdom and the figure is roughly 80 million. That is about twenty four per cent by my count, and the paper puts it at nearly twenty six per cent, a difference that comes down to which snapshot of a constantly growing database you are looking at. Either way, the shape of the thing is the same. One country supplies something close to a quarter of what science formally knows about where insects are.
Now run the same query for Brazil. Around three million records. Indonesia, one of the most insect-rich countries that has ever existed, comes back with well under a million. The entire nation of Indonesia has roughly one per cent of the British total.
This is not because there are fewer insects there. It is because there are fewer people being paid to write them down, fewer institutions to store the specimens, and fewer journals willing to publish the results in a language the database can read.
That last point turns out to matter enormously, and it is the first of four barriers the researchers identify. A great deal of tropical insect research does exist. It is simply invisible. It gets published in national journals, in regional languages, in university bulletins that never get indexed, in theses that sit on a shelf in a departmental library and nowhere else. To an international database, work that is not in English and not in a major indexed journal might as well not have happened. The knowledge is real. The pipeline that would carry it into global science is missing.
The second barrier is the raw data shortfall, and the team breaks it into parts that each have their own fix. There is almost no systematic long-term insect monitoring in tropical countries, the kind of repeated annual counting that lets you say whether a population is rising or falling rather than just that it exists. Citizen science, which now drives an enormous share of temperate insect records, has barely taken hold in most tropical regions. There are nowhere near enough trained taxonomists, the specialists who can look at a small brown beetle and say which of several thousand small brown beetles it is. This is a genuine global bottleneck and it is getting worse rather than better. Describing a new species properly is slow, meticulous, poorly funded work that produces very few citations, which in a modern university career structure makes it close to professional suicide. The people who can do it are ageing out, their positions are being converted into something more fundable, and the queue of undescribed specimens in the world’s collections keeps growing. There are drawers in museums right now holding insects nobody has ever named, collected decades ago, waiting for a person who no longer exists in sufficient numbers. And the specimens that have been collected are often physically inaccessible, sitting in drawers in institutions with no scanner, no database and no funding to make a catalogue.
The third barrier is infrastructure, which is the polite word for money. Tropical countries face financial constraints that have nothing to do with scientific ambition. Museum collections are scarce and frequently under-resourced. Computing capacity for the kind of modelling that modern conservation planning requires is limited. Some of the richest insect habitats on Earth sit in places where fieldwork carries genuine security risks.
And the fourth barrier is the one that makes the other three sting. Even where the knowledge exists, it very often does not turn into conservation action. Insects are almost absent from national conservation planning in most of the world. They rarely appear on protected species lists. They are rarely factored into how a reserve boundary is drawn. A tiny fraction of insect species have ever been assessed for extinction risk at all, and the ones that have tend to be the charismatic ones, the big showy butterflies and the dragonflies people like looking at. Everything else is classed as data deficient, which is a technical term that means nobody knows, and which in practice functions as permission to do nothing.
Somewhere inside all of this sits a practice the paper names directly, and the name has stuck because it is so exact. Parachute science. A research team from a wealthy country flies into a tropical nation, collects specimens or data, flies home, publishes in an international journal, and leaves behind essentially nothing. No local co-author with a leading role. No copy of the dataset in a national repository. No training, no equipment, no next step. Local researchers who did the actual finding, who knew which valley to walk up and which tree the thing sits on, are treated as field assistants rather than colleagues. The country supplies the biodiversity and receives a citation, if that.
The corrosive part is not just the unfairness. It is that parachute science produces a body of knowledge that cannot be maintained. A one-off survey tells you what was there on one afternoon. Conservation needs to know what is happening over decades, and only people who live there can produce that.
To show what the alternative looks like, the team worked through a single country in detail, using butterflies in Bangladesh as a test case. Butterflies are a reasonable bellwether because they are large, colourful, popular with amateurs and relatively well studied compared with, say, parasitic wasps.
The first thing they did was go looking for the invisible literature, and they found it. There were 111 published studies on the butterflies of Bangladesh. Only 34 of them had appeared in international journals. More than two thirds of the country’s own butterfly science had never reached the databases that global conservation planning draws on. And of those 111 studies, only three were focused on conservation itself. The research existed. It described, it listed, it recorded. It almost never reached the point of saying what should be protected and how.
Then they did something that sounds slightly absurd until you see the result. They went on Facebook.
There are active amateur naturalist groups in Bangladesh where people post photographs of butterflies they have seen, usually with a location and a date attached, often with an identification argued out in the comments by people who genuinely know what they are looking at. The researchers treated those posts as data. When they compiled the results, they found records for 167 of the country’s 169 threatened butterfly species.
One hundred and sixty seven out of one hundred and sixty nine. Sitting in plain sight, on a social media platform, uploaded for free by people who were not being paid and in most cases were not being counted as contributors to science at all.
That is the whole argument of the paper in one finding. The knowledge gap is not always a knowledge gap. Sometimes it is a plumbing problem. The observations have already been made. They are just not in the pipe.
With those records folded in, the team could do the kind of analysis that had previously been impossible for the country. They could map where species actually occur rather than where researchers happen to have visited. They could check how well the existing protected areas cover the ranges of threatened species, and the answer was not encouraging. They could model how habitat suitability is likely to shift as the climate changes, and the projection there is bleak: something in the order of forty two per cent of the country’s butterfly species face a meaningful risk of disappearing locally.
None of that could have been said a few years ago. Not because the butterflies were hiding, but because nobody had connected the amateur photographs to the museum drawers to the untranslated papers.
It is worth stopping for a second on why any of this matters beyond the satisfaction of a well-filled database, because insects are the kind of subject people nod along to without quite feeling. Insects pollinate around eighty per cent of wild plant species. They are the direct food supply for roughly sixty per cent of bird species. They break down dead material, turn over soil, control the populations of other insects that would otherwise eat crops, and sit at the bottom of food chains that end in things people do care about. Estimates of how many insect species exist run somewhere between fourteen and thirty million, and the overwhelming majority have never been formally described at all. When conservationists talk about biodiversity loss, insects are most of the biodiversity.
And every serious decision about them, every extinction risk assessment, every protected area boundary, every climate range projection, is built from data. If a quarter of that data comes from one temperate island and a tropical megadiverse nation contributes one per cent, then the models are being trained on a sample that does not resemble the world.
The fix the researchers propose is deliberately unglamorous, which is probably why it might work. Go and find the regional literature that already exists, including in languages other than English, and connect it to expert networks in the countries concerned. Expand citizen science in the tropics, and expand it past the photogenic species, because somebody has to count the flies too. Build and fund national biodiversity collections so that specimens stay in the country that produced them and can actually be consulted. Digitise the drawers that already exist. Treat social media observations, local naturalist knowledge and Indigenous knowledge as real evidence rather than colour.
And, running through all of it, change who holds the pen. The framework is explicit that international partnerships have to be structured so local researchers lead, that national regulations and benefit-sharing rules are followed rather than worked around, and that the country supplying the biodiversity retains sovereignty over the data about it.
Chowdhury’s framing of the problem is blunt, and it has less to do with discovery than people expect. The task is not primarily to go out and generate vast quantities of new information. It is to get much better at finding, connecting and using the knowledge that has already been produced by people whose names are not on the papers.
There is something quietly hopeful buried in that. A knowledge gap caused by there being nothing to know would be a hard problem, and an expensive one, and slow. A knowledge gap caused by the observations existing in the wrong format, in the wrong language, on the wrong platform, credited to the wrong people, is a solvable problem. Somebody in Bangladesh already photographed 167 of those 169 threatened butterflies. Somebody in a university in Dhaka already wrote the paper that nobody outside the country read.
The insects were never missing. The people counting them were just never invited in.