Insect conservation: finding the way forward

Abstract

Relatively speaking, the conservation of mammals, birds and other large terrestrial vertebrates is a simple task. The bulk of species are described, their ecologies are reasonably well known, the threats to their habitat or breeding systems are often documented, and the funding to implement recovery programmes frequently available; for example, mammals and birds are charismatic and the general public are fairly easily persuaded to identify with flagship species such as elephants, lions and snow leopards and financially support their conservation (Wilson, 1987; Clark & May, 2002) The major problems facing large vertebrate conservation are habitat loss and genetic bottlenecks. There is no shortage of volunteers to count, survey and protect these species; for example, turtle watch and bird counts in Britain and North America, although perhaps we should be less sanguine about the potential success of such recovery programmes (Scott et al., 2005). Things are somewhat different with invertebrates – how do we conserve species when we have very limited knowledge of which species are endangered or even how many species there are? Estimates of the number of insect species thought to exist globally vary widely (Stork, 1988), but there are probably 4–6 million