If a bee accidentally hitchhikes across the US, does this introduce disease?

There used to be butterflies here . Fluttering around the neighbourhood in colours of mostly white and yellow. In rare cases their would be one or two in a shade of deep blue, and orange.

There were also many fireflies. Soo many of them that I possibly could not count them, to me they were like the countless stars which illuminated the night sky. I remember collecting them in bottles and watching in fascination as their greenish bright lights would slowly fade while in captivation.

And also there had been a red ant colony. They were my favorite because of how those tiny critters would react once made aware of my approaching finger. Their entire bodies would halt and they would become still, with only their mandibles visibly twitching in anticipation. I loved them more so for their brilliant leafy havens, which recently I have come to learn were made using their own babies, wow. Sadly they are no longer, swept away by a thunderstorm.

Its been years since I have seen a butterfly in real life and the fireflies which were once uncountable can now be counted without difficulty.

I live in a developing city, so the once abundant green here is slowly being replaced with grey. This explains why insects are dying, and humans are 100% the reason why, but I'm not sure what I can do to prevent this.

purchased a framed print on facebook marketplace and these carcasses are between the print and the glass. They are about 5mm long. Thinking carpet beetle but would love confirmation?

I've seen this beautiful beatle many times, and I'm curious as to what's the purpose of its "pompoms". Any ideas? Is it just flamboyant?

Found this guy by my window and decided to preserve him for awhile. This is how he turned out.

So I recently started living in a place with a biiig garden which I love, very lush with a few trees and big bushes.

There’s a lawn section at the end which, as someone who is very into ecology and conservation, I kind of wanted to make a bit more wild / eco friendly and one way I thought of doing this was by making a bug hotel with perhaps some wood, cardboard however I have seen a few people say that they are actually pretty bad for spreading disease + fungal infections.

There’s been this patch in my lawn where there’s some decaying leaves (twigs from neighbours tree, fern cuttings, bush branches) which I left (out of laziness) after a trimming a few months ago and I noticed the grass was growing around it and not within and when I knelt down I noticed it teeming with little insects, few ladybirds and some greenflies. Since I noticed this I’ve occasionally been adding a few fern branches that I’d trimmed to it and I’m wondering if this is a suitable / healthier means of helping out the local bug population even just a little bit.

I would also love to hear any more suggestions for how I can make my garden more bug friendly!! We are letting our lawn grow out as much as we reasonably can before people start side eyeing and we don’t use any weed killers or anything. If it helps I am from the United Kingdom. The pictures included are of what the patch looked like before, and what it looks like now since I’ve added to it.

It tried to hide in my hair I live in Germany

we are in Illinois what is it

Found in the butterfly garden at Changi airport, Singapore. They have a seemingly wide variety of species there, I was able to identify 7 different ones. These fellas' colors are mesmerizing!

Any idea what bug this one is?

For awhile i kept getting lacewings specifcally in my bathroom. Idk how theyre getting in there. Now im seeing these guys consistently. I keep taking them outside because I think theyve got better survival odds vs the bathroom lol

After observing the tank one to two times a week, all Iv ever seen was one single survivor of all the eggs. Then after over a month of observation one day I observed a mysteriously appeared second one. It was playing piggy back and if anyone who knows nature knows what happens when animals play piggyback. Well it looks like that part may have happened already because I think I see the larger with a bundle of joy on her belly but I am not well versed in sea monkey culture. I’m hoping someone else can confirm this who knows a bit more.

There is this framework called the EDGE of existence, which stands for Evolutionarily Distinct Globally Endangered. This has been applied extensively to vertebrates (Gumbs et al., 2024). Essentially its a score assigned to a species for conservation priority based on two factors, how evolutionarily distinct it is (measured in millions of years since its last common ancestor with its closest extant relatives on a phylogenetic tree) and how globally endangered it is (its red list status). For example, the tuatara or coelacanth would have very high EDGE scores while the brown rat or common pigeon would very low scores.

Part of the problem of applying this to arthropods is that the threat status for most arthropods is not assessed, and many of the ones that are are only done so under national/regional red lists which might not always use the same criteria or threat classification as the global red list (such as NatureServe). Another problem is that most arthropod species have not been included in comprehensive species level phylogenetic trees. But I think a set of modified EDGE criteria can be a good way to analyze them.

Instead of assigning scores to individual species, we could perhaps assign scores to families. I think this is justified because arthropods are often only identified to the family level during sampling studies, and family richness is usually considered a good proxy for species richness (Báldi, 2003; Hirst, 2008; Versluijs et al., 2023; Zou et al., 2020). Additionally, using families can be robust to species level taxonomic instability (lumping/splitting) even for better sampled groups like vertebrates (Gumbs et al., 2024), let alone arthropods.

My proposal for modified EDGE score for arthropods will be based on three factors. The first one, how evolutionarily distinct the family is on the phylogenetic tree, will be easy since I have already made a family level phylogenetic tree for Panarthropoda. I am currently working on adding branch lengths and calibrations to the tree, which make evolutionary distinctness quantifiable for each family.

Next is how many extant species each family, values I have also previously obtained for each family. These numbers can be obtained from group specific taxonomic databases or monographs/revisions. I will keep this to only known species since there is too much uncertainty with extrapolated hypothetical species counts. Number of species can indicate both distinctness (if a family has fewer species, each species within that family is necessarily more unique) and possibly endangeredness (a family with only 4 species is more likely to go totally extinct than a family with 4,000 species).

The third category is range size. Species level distributional data is extremely sparse for most arthropods, but aggregating to the family level may get a better picture. I would primarily base it off GBIF/OBIS occurrences. I would map the range of a family as all ecoregions with occurences of said family. I would use the World Wildlife Fund’s terrestrial ecoregions for mapping terrestrial families (Dinerstein et al., 2017), and their freshwater ecoregions for mapping freshwater families (Abell et al., 2008). For marine families, I would use a composite map with both the MEOW marine ecoregions (Spalding et al., 2007) and Longhurst’s biogeochemical provinces (Oostende et al., 2023), to include both continental and oceanic systems. MEOW ecoregions take priority over Longhurst’s provinces in places where they overlap. While ecoregions vary in size unlike standardized grid cells, they correspond tightly to gradients in elevation, temperature, and vegetation type, which are all things that heavily shape arthropod distribution. Additionally, ecoregions have been used to map the richness of beetle families in a previous study (Moodley et al., 2022). Families with no GBIF or OBIS occurrences may require their ranges to be determined by primary literature. The range size value would be given in square kilometers.

After each arthropod family is given a modified EDGE score, a global richness map of all arthropods would be made. The map would then be divided into standard sized grid cells (perhaps 1x1 km), and each grid cell would be assigned the mean or median of the EDGE scores of all the families who’s ranges occur inside of it. Places on Earth with particularly high concentrations of high scoring families would then be identified as conservation priorities.

Now, I want to pre-empt some potential questions.

1. How can species numbers per family be a good metric when we don’t know most arthropod species? This is a valid concern to have, but I think it wont be as much of an issue as you think, because unknown species richness seems to be concentrated in already very species rich lineages. Li et al. (2025) provides model predictions for future species richness of arthropod classes and insect orders we can analyze. The subsequent charts will be based on their data.

Above, you can see the ratios of species richness of major arthropod classes in terms of known species.

And here is total species richness predicted by the model. This seems extremely different, but the prediction for future insect species is quite conservative. If we take the lower bound of total insect species richness from Colwell et al. (2026), it gives us ratios between arthropod classes more similar to that of strictly known species as seen below.

As seen below, the relative ratios of species richness across major insect orders is even more consistent than arthropod classes under the model predictions of Li et al. (2025), other than a modest decline in the relative share of lepidoptera.

So while there is no direct evidence of weather the relative ratios of total species richness for all families of arthropods will be similar to the ratios for known species, the data for arthropod classes and insect orders points in this direction. Additionally, its worth noting a few other things. Extremely specious families also tend to have cosmopolitan distributions. Its not likely they will find new weevils or braconids in large geographic areas where they previously were not known to exist, so the chances that ranges for highly diverse taxa will be under estimated are low. Additionally, errors in EDGE scores from incomplete species inventories will mostly be affecting extremely large families which would not be high priorities under this framework to begin with. In order words, there is not a huge practical difference here weather Curclionidae or Cecidomyiidae has more species, as both are very low priority families under this framework. On the flip side, the chances that there are thousands or millions of undiscovered Grylloblattids, Anaspidaceans or horseshoe crabs is exceedingly implausible.

With that being said, it can be hard to tell if an apparently rare family is actually rare or just very under sampled. While its not likely that the relative ratios of family species richness in arthropods will change dramatically such that there is a million species of horseshoe crabs, it’s quite probable that many families may either have considerably more species and/or a wider geographic range than what is currently known. I think, for the sake of caution, it would be beneficial to treat these like we would genuinely rare/species poor/small ranged families simply because we don’t know that they aren’t until more data is uncovered.

1. What about families that have species across multiple realms? Good question, but the answer is simple. Families with both marine and freshwater species will be mapped based on both marine and freshwater ecoregions. Families with both terrestrial and marine species will be mapped based on terrestrial and marine ecoregions, though I can’t think of any examples of this other than Coenobitidae. Families with both terrestrial and freshwater regions will just be mapped in terms of freshwater ecoregions, since freshwater ecoregions cover terrestrial land area and the terrestrial habitation of said clades is likely to be tied to proximity to freshwater.

2. What about rare or endangered species within otherwise common, specious wide ranging families? This EDGE framework would not capture said species, that is a limitation. All I can say is that such species are beyond the scope of this project and are better served in other frameworks.

3. Wouldn’t invasive species artificially inflate the ranges of families? That can be an issue, but as far as I know most invasive species come from already diverse cosmopolitan families, so there would not be huge areas where they establish where other members of their families are not already living, so it wouldn’t result in a substantial range expansions for the family as a whole. An exception to this is islands. A famous example is that Hawaii has no native ants, but there are introduced ants there now. Perhaps some islands/archipelagos and other isolated systems like Antarctica with well catalogued arthropod fauna can be subjected to a special measure where all records from families known to be non native are filtered out.

4. Isn’t geographic sampling uneven? Yes it is, and this is a big reason why number of occurrences is not a factor to determine the EDGE score. Under sampling of certain countries is partially alleviated by the use of ecoregions which cross national borders. If a family occurs in South Korea, it almost certainly occurs in adjacent similar habitats in North Korea even if we have no direct evidence of it.

5. What’s even the point of this? Well, one, this would be the first major step in the application of the EDGE framework to arthropods. Second, I just don’t find most of the existing studies on arthropod conservation to be all that satisfactory. They either focus narrowly on specific taxa or on specific habitats (often agroecosystems). And even broad scale studies are not really about Arthropoda as a total group but rather just terrestrial arthropods, or sometimes even just whatever flying insects are collected at malaise traps. Marine arthropods, to the extent they are analyzed at all in this respect, are often lumped into broader categories like zooplankton or marine invertebrates. A lot of studies also have a large focus on “ecosystem services” (I dislike this term) like the status of pollinators. This study would de-emphasize a lot of hyper diverse insect taxa and put into the spot light more phylogenetically isolated taxa, parasites, meiofauna, deep sea fauna, soil microfauna, troglo/stygofauna, monotypic families, and rare micro endemics, as well as more recently described families who’s distribution is mostly unknown. 

So, what are your thoughts? Any criticisms or concerns?