Order Among the Orders How many insects are there?
Aggregation of butterflies on the ground (Venezuela).		At any given moment more than a quintillion insects are going about their business. The entomologist who arrived at this figure obviously had a lot of free time. Since quintillion is not a figure you hear every day, to give you an idea of how many insects we're talking about: there are 200 million insects for every human on Earth! Entomologists studying this incredible biomass have indexed more than one and a half million species of insects. By contrast, there are only 8,600 species of birds and 4,000 species of mammals in the world. What's more, five new insect species are discovered every day.

Insect orders
Insect species presenting common physical traits have been divided into about 30 groups called insect orders. The idea of classifying insects by order is not new. It goes back to Aristotle, who invented the very first insect order in 330 B.C. He grouped all two-winged insects together under the designation of Diptera. Each insect order encompasses thousands of different species. The entomologists therefore later subdivided these orders into families, the families into genera, and the genera into species. This way, every different insect can be accurately described, without a chance of being mistaken for another.		Aristotle's fly.

Nom d'un insecte !
A congarochos-- its real name is Megasoma actaeon.		What is the name of the insect in this photo? The Piaroa Indians of Venezuela call it the ÇCongarochosÈ; another tribe knows it as a ÇCongarochisÈ or a ÇPapasoÈ. To avoid this kind of confusion, entomologists all over the world have agreed to give each insect a single scientific name made up of two Latin words defining a genus (which is capitalized) and a species (which is not). Researchers the world ever know this insect as a Megasoma actaeon and nothing else.

To summarize ...
The different categories used to classify plants and animals are called taxa (singular: taxon). Here then is the exact position that two well-known animals, a man and a bee, occupy in the living world. We start with the most general, the kingdom, and end with the most specific, the species. TAXA MAN BEE Kingdom: Animal Animal Phylum: Chordata Arthropoda Class: Mammalia Insecta Order: Primates Hymenoptera Family: Hominidae Apidae Genus: Homo Apis Species sapiens mellifera So a man is universally known as Homo sapiens, whereas a bee is known as Apis mellifera.

Maintaining order!
		Here are the main orders of insects and the number of species they contain. Order Example Number of species Coleoptera Beetles, scarabs 350,000 Hymenoptera Wasps, bees, ants 190,000 Lepidoptera Butterflies, moths 140,000 Diptera Flies, mosquitoes 125,000 Hemiptera True bugs, leaf bugs 62,000 Homoptera Cicadas, aphids 33,000 Orthoptera Grasshoppers, crickets 20,000 Ordonata Dragonflies, damselflies 6,000