ESTIMATES of biodiversity in rainforests should be slashed by two-thirds,
according to Frode Ødegaard of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in
Trondheim.
To find out how many species of insect there are in the rainforests,
biologists spray trees with insecticide to see what drops out. Estimating how
many species are specific to different types of tree gives an idea of the total
number of species, previously believed to be more than 30 million.
But beetles—the most diverse insect group—may not be as choosy as
biologists thought, says Ødegaard. He found that many beetles have a much wider…
