The Amazon's lush rainforest harbours a hidden world of tiny creatures, nearly all of them unknown to science. But now hundreds of scientists in Brazil are collaborating on a quest to count every species of insect in one expanse of the Amazon ' the largest insect-biodiversity study to ever explore the forest from the ground to the canopy. Preliminary data suggest that the number of insect species could surpass 40,000, which is almost 0.7% of the widely accepted estimate of 6 million living insect species worldwide. And that 40,000 figure is for a single location in the Amazon. 'If we start sampling other parts of the forest, the number of new species will likely increase almost exponentially,' says Jose Rafael, an entomologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil, and one of the scientists leading the megaproject. The project is unique, says Rudolf Meier, an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, because it is collecting insects...
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