Here’s a trivia question for you: What branch on the tree of life has at least 14 million unique living members and can be found on every continent? According to research out today, the answer is the tiny but mighty insect. An international team of researchers conducted an exhaustive genetic survey of insects in Costa Rica to come up with the figure. At minimum, they estimate, there are likely somewhere between 14 and 20 million insect species in the world. These numbers are well above most current estimates and suggest scientists need to do a much better job at cataloging the vast diversity of insects that roam the Earth, the researchers say. “Our study provides a baseline to understand how much more we need to learn about insects. We need this baseline to understand the scope of current insect declines,” study author Laura Melissa Guzman, an associate professor in the department of entomology at Cornell University, told Gizmodo. The insect census As you might imagine, it’s no easy task trying to figure out how many distinct species of insect there are in the world. It’s not exactly like you can get every bug to line up for a count, and many species in the same broad insect group can look remarkably similar to each other on a surface level.