Hello Jennifer,
I'm a grad student at the University of Colorado studying Geographic Information Systems. I can complete your project quite quickly using ArcGIS. I'll create a vector point layer for each species or however you want it broken down, and then use the points to create a polygon. Using a layer of continent polygons, I can then clip any part of the polygon that insects land.
Depending on the size of the data file, I can use SQL Server to perform queries to separate the data into more manageable sizes for the polygon creation, but from the few samples I downloaded, it shouldn't be necessary.
Look forward to hearing back from you,
Andrew Kovacs