Threatened arthropods United States, and IUCN Red List for international purposes. Only a tiny fraction of the planet's endangered arthropods are formally recognized as such, as no one has ever evaluated the conservation status of the vast majority of arthropod species. It is difficult to estimate the total number of endangered arthropod species, since many of the taxa themselves have not been recorded. For example, in North America the estimated number of insect species exceeds 163,000, of which only about two thirds are taxonomically known. An even greater discovery awaiting, over 72 percent of North American arachnids are yet to be named
Threatened arthropods Thus extinction of arthropods species threaten to make extinct hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of higher order birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. There are several pathways of endangerment for arthropods; however, most of them stem from the pressures of an expanding human population and resulting actions humans take to produce food, housing, transportation and recreation. Probably the greatest hazard to arthropod survival is agriculture, due to the ever increasing demand of the human population to feed its expanding numbers. Agriculture typically results in a monoculture that cannot support the biodiversity nurtured by the predecessor natural environment. Normally arthropods represent