Already as a child i was absolutely still with fascination. Every moment of the day and night they crawl, squirm, flitter, scramble and tiptoe just outside your awareness: in the lawn, behind the bed, beneath your eyelashes.
The construction plan of beetles is 265 mill years old, and they are still going strong. By nearly any measure, the most successful animals on the planet are the arthropods. They have conquered land, water and air, and make up over three-quarters of all currently known living and fossil organisms, or over one million species in all.
Since many arthropod species remain undocumented or undiscovered, especially in tropical rain forests, the true number of living arthropod species is probably in the tens of millions. One recent conservative estimate puts the number of arthropod species in tropical forests at 6 to 9 million species. The Class of Insects presents the greatest species richness ever seen in the animal kingdom, with 751’000 described species and many others awaiting description.