CA Has 60,000 Insect Species, New Study Finds

LOS ANGELES, CA — A Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County-led study published Wednesday found California is home to more than 60,000 insect species, though scientists have described only about two-thirds of them.

The study is the first publication from the California Insect Barcode Initiative, a multi-institution project that has used DNA barcoding on more than 1 million insect specimens collected across the state.

Researchers found that insect communities differed from site to site, even in places with similar climates and geography. Among the Level 3 ecoregions studied, the Mojave Basin and Range had the highest insect species richness, according to the museum.

"No matter how you slice and dice it, there are a tremendous number of insect species in California," said Megan Barkdull, an NHM entomology curator and co-author of the study. "The rate we're identifying new species with this data is nowhere near leveling off. Even with all the work that we did through the California Insect Barcode Initiative, we're not anywhere close to having collected them all."

The project brought together researchers from NHM, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, the San Diego Natural History Museum and the California Academy of Sciences, among other institutions.

Researchers set Malaise traps in 72 ecoregions statewide and conducted dedicated expeditions to 454 additional locations. The traps passively capture insects, which were sent to laboratories for DNA extraction and analysis. Researchers linked DNA sequences to insect specimens to build a digital library that can identify known species and help determine whether specimens may belong to species not yet known to science.

Volunteers helped manage traps and collect specimens, enabling continuous weekly sampling, said Giar-Ann Kung, NHM's entomology collections manager and a co-author of the study.

The researchers compared parallel ecoregions and found that each had a distinct insect community, even when the regions shared similar climates and geography, Barkdull said.

The findings highlight the diversity of insect life in California and the need to conserve the wild places where the insects live, according to the researchers. The initiative is a $6 million grant-funded project aimed at collecting and identifying every insect species in the state.

"We've been all over the state using every collecting method in the book, and our efforts have resulted in one of the largest insect biodiversity datasets ever put together," said Austin Baker, the study's lead author, a senior research scientist at BioKEA and a former NHM postdoctoral fellow who led the California Insect Barcode Initiative.

The study is published in the journal Ecography.

Copyright 2026, City News Service, Inc.