88.5% of North American Insects and Arachnids Have No Conservation Status

Insects and arachnids run the planet. They pollinate crops, decompose organic matter, control pest populations, and form the dietary base for birds, reptiles, and freshwater fish. Take them away and most terrestrial ecosystems collapse within years. That makes the finding at the center of a new PNAS study particularly stark: for 88.5% of the 99,312 known insect and arachnid species in North America north of Mexico, conservation science has no idea how they are doing.

Laura Figueroa, an assistant professor of environmental conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her graduate student Wes Walsh spent two years compiling conservation assessments for every documented species in this group. The data gap they uncovered is not a minor oversight. It is a structural failure in how biodiversity is monitored and protected.

What 88.5% Means in Practice

A conservation status - even a basic one indicating a species is of least concern - requires some assessment. Someone must gather occurrence data, estimate population trends, and evaluate threats. For the vast majority of invertebrates, that work has simply never been done.

"Almost 90% of insect and arachnid species have no conservation status," said Figueroa. "We simply have no idea how they are doing."

The species that do have assessments reveal a pattern of selection bias. Aquatic invertebrates - mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies - are disproportionately represented because they serve as water quality indicators and regulatory frameworks require their monitoring. Charismatic groups like butterflies and dragonflies receive more attention than their ecological roles alone would justify. Meanwhile, arachnids - spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, mites - are virtually absent from state protection lists. Most states do not protect a single arachnid species.

Walsh, who sports a spider tattoo on his arm, put it directly: "Insects and arachnids are more than objects of fear. We need to appreciate them for their ecological importance, and that begins with collecting more data and considering them worthy of conservation."

The Political Economy of Conservation

The researchers did not just count gaps. They looked for patterns in what determines whether a state protects invertebrates at all. Two factors emerged clearly.

States with economies centered on extractive industries - mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction - were less likely to protect either insects or arachnids. States with what the researchers characterized as more eco-centric public attitudes protected more species. The correlation does not establish causation, but it is consistent with the intuition that conservation policy reflects political economy as much as ecological need.

The comparison to bird conservation is instructive. North American bird populations are better monitored than almost any other wildlife group, and conservation efforts have been relatively effective at preventing extinctions. Figueroa attributes this partly to coalition breadth: hunters, birdwatchers, ornithologists, and nonprofit organizations have aligned around shared goals. Insects and arachnids lack comparable advocacy coalitions, partly because fewer people feel attachment to them and partly because the sheer number of species makes the task daunting.

What the "Insect Apocalypse" Framing Gets Wrong

Media coverage of invertebrate decline often invokes dramatic language about catastrophic collapse. The Figueroa and Walsh study adds an important epistemic caveat: most of what is described as the "insect apocalypse" is actually a signal visible in the small fraction of species that have been monitored. For the 88.5% with no status, the question is not whether they are declining but whether we would know if they were.

That uncertainty cuts both ways. Some invertebrate populations may be stable or even expanding. Others may have already collapsed without anyone noticing. Without baseline data, distinguishing those trajectories is impossible, and designing conservation interventions based on a systematically biased sample risks misallocating limited resources.

The researchers call for expanded monitoring programs that explicitly prioritize understudied groups - particularly arachnids and the less charismatic insect orders - and for conservation policy frameworks that require assessments before species reach crisis status rather than after.