Mealworms eat Polystyrene?

[wcbpolish]

A friend forwarded me this article... it seems too good to be true. Thoughts?

news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/worms-digest-plastics-092915.html

A short quote:

In the lab, 100 mealworms ate between 34 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam – about the weight of a small pill – per day. The worms converted about half of the Styrofoam into carbon dioxide, as they would with any food source.

Within 24 hours, they excreted the bulk of the remaining plastic as biodegraded fragments that look similar to tiny rabbit droppings. Mealworms fed a steady diet of Styrofoam were as healthy as those eating a normal diet, Wu said, and their waste appeared to be safe to use as soil for crops.

[Salmonsaladsandwich]

Does this mean plastic can be converted into food for humans?!?

[Salmonsaladsandwich]

Link doesn't work btw

[Hisserdude]

I saw this a few months ago, pretty cool stuff. It would be cool if we could get rid of most of our plastic and turn it into dirt!

[Salmonsaladsandwich]

But seriously, just think about it... If this potentially world- changing discovery about one of the first and most commonly studied feeder insects went unnoticed for this long, just think about what some of the millions of undiscovered and unstudied insects could be capable of. Maybe somewhere there's an insect that can eat plastic water bottles?

[Roach collector]

That would be great if it was true

[Allpet Roaches]

It seems unbelievable. Imagine if I could put some styrofoam in my mealworm culture and not have to worry about mites and moisture levels. And yet, other beetle larvae I have refuse to eat (let alone digest) the small pieces of sytrofoam that end up in collected leaves. I'm going to put my mealworm culture next to my cold fusion generator.

[varnon]

I saw this a few months ago. After seeing it, I tried giving styrofoam packing peanuts to my bugs. Hissers won't eat it. Banana roaches and isopods might. But my native darkling beetle collection definitely will eat them. They don't seem to love it, but they eat it. Now I recycle my styrofoam into bugs along with all my cardboard. Honestly, bugs are going to be the future of green initiatives. They are just so good at recycling things. Someone should really try to cultivate mealworms that really love the stuff. Should be too hard to do some selective breeding projects. Or maybe just get a ton of mealworms to start with and only feed them styrofoam and let selection take its own course from there.

[Roach collector]

If you fed feeder mealworms styrofoam only and fed that to your pet it would affect the pets health correct?

[Roach collector]

I didn't do this I'm just asking

[Salmonsaladsandwich]

Nah, It's pretty inert. Probably no different from if the mealworms had tough plant matter in their guts.

[Roach collector]

Ok thanks

[wcbpolish]

I suspect that a plastic based diet alone would not be nutritionally sufficient (especially since polystyrene has no P or N in it... at some point the bugs would need to make proteins and nucleic acids). The original article said they were sustained for 1 mo on styrofoam. I suspect that other micronutrients would be needed at some point. And then there's the whole issue of bio-accumulation of whatever toxins might be in the foam... so probably not a great food for "feeder" insects.

But as a whole, I think it is pretty neat, and at some point in the future I might try this.

[Roshan Vignarajah]

In this case, this is one thing I have a considerable amount of experience with.  I started both my mealworm and superworm colonies in 2020 for this very purpose.  And yes, they are incredibly fast at eating polystyrene and polyethylene.  Polystyrene supplemented with some oats and a water source is a complete diet, with no evidence of a reduced survival rate.  I stopped feeding them polystryene about 6 months ago, but the colony is going strong still.  Over ~4 generations, the culture is going perfectly fine.  There is a fire-retardant in some polystrene that is a real bio hazard that can't be broken down by the mealworms, so any waste that contains this should be thrown out.  Otherwise the waste should be completely compostable.  I wouldn't recommend feeding mealworms who have been fed this to other animals.

[Allpet Roaches]

I tried it for a number of years but included some regular food just in case. My very old yellow mealworm colony eventually all died, every last one. They seemed okay with eating it for a long time but crashed and died after four to five years. Maybe the Styrofoam I tried was treated with something, but it was regular packing Styrofoam.  My experiences makes me wonder if mealworms living on Styrofoam is a hoax that is not very easy to disprove.