If it’s not about size, why are 80% of all individual animals nematodes yet only 0.01% of animal observations on iNat are Nematodes? I am genuinely curious what other than their tiny size could possibly explain this.
And why are many of these taxa not practically observable? Size.
The point is that many insects are not practically observable in an identifiable way. Plenty are. But loads of insects require microscopy to identify, so you run into the same issue that makes 100% of rotifers/gastrotrichs unidentifiable to the average iNatter:
And while plenty of insects are identifiable from a good macro photo, many are not. And the percent of them that are not is higher than the corresponding percent for vertebrates, bivalves, etc. Which is why all the responses here keep saying the same thing: “Insects” as a group are inherently less identifiable than other popular taxa, and will always have a lower percent identified to species than vertebrates, no matter how many identifiers look at them. In terms of species richness, insects may be
But that species richness does not correspond to anywhere near 50% of biomass. If you just go out “into nature”, about 85% of the life you encounter by mass is plant life, with another 13% being microbes, about 1% fungi, and about 1% everything else (including insects). As I mentioned before, if you go by individual organisms, Nematodes win out by a lot. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the percent of species of insects with the percent of observations of individual insects and expect them to be similar. “Plant” as a material is much more abundant than “Insect” as a material, and “Worms” as individuals are much more common than “Insects” as individuals. Beetles and Plants may have roughly the same number of species, but plants are generally bigger, easier to observe, easier to identify, and simpler to photograph. Plus they are more conspicuous and occupy a lot more space in Nature than beetles do.
So again I ask, what is the “action item” that is the intended take-home from all these numbers?