Right, I'm only writing this because I find some of the methods of counting the species simply interesting. In 1982, the Erwin study took place - basically Erwin desperately wanted to find out how many species are there in the world. Of course it would be rather impossible to count every single organism, therefore he decided to focus on beetles only. He particularly studied them in Panama and then later on did some more research in Brazil. Now, here is the part I am excited about: he fogged 19 types of trees over 3 seasons (this of course was in the tropical forests, because that is the area of the most heterogeneity of insects, particularly beetles) and then collected all the dead insects that fell off the trees. I had to write about this, because in my opinion this is such an unique way of approaching the desire to count up loads of different species of insects. Apart from all the dead organisms he managed to collect, he also considered the rest of insects living in the forest floor and then added it all up together. In the end he came up with quite a controversial amount, namely 30 million insect species in the tropical forests themselves! There have been quite a lot criticism from other scientists and beetle experts in reaction to Erwin's study. One of the most important issues regarding his research is the fact that Erwin could have underestimated biodiversity simply due to the fact that he was not aware of what amount of diversity of beetles from the tress he was sampling. Oh well, I guess it's not a really easy task to do... Currently, it is predicted that there are between 5 to 50 mln of species on Earth (1.5 have been already described).

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