Mealworms can eat and absorb plastic, offering potential insights for reducing pollution.
Plastic pollution pervades ecosystems worldwide and persists for decades. Could insects hold the key to solving this problem?
Previous research found that insects can ingest and absorb pure, unrefined microplastics—but only under unrealistic, food-scarce situations. In a new Biology Letters paper, UBC zoologist Dr. Michelle Tseng and alumna Shim Gicole tested mealworms in a more realistic scenario, feeding them ground-up face masks—a common plastic product—mixed with bran, a tastier option.
Reality bites
Mealworms are Nature’s scavengers and decomposers, able to survive up to eight months without food or water, and happy to eat their own kind when food is scarce.
After 30 days, the research team found the mealworms ate about half the microplastics available, about 150 particles per insect, and gained weight. They excreted a small fraction of the microplastics consumed, about four to six particles per milligram of waste, absorbing the rest. Eating microplastics did not appear to affect the insects’ survival and growth.
Plastic-eating partners
Dr. Tseng says the next step will be to learn from the insects’ digestive mechanisms how to break down microplastics, and scale up these learnings to address plastic pollution. “Perhaps we can start viewing bugs as friends. We’re killing millions of insects every day from general pesticides – the very same insects we could be learning from to break down these plastics and other chemicals.”
Reference: “Partial consumption of medical face masks by a common beetle species” by Shim Gicole, Alexandra Dimitriou, Natasha Klasios and Michelle Tseng, 30 November 2024, Biology Letters.
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0380
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2 Comments
It’s all well and good but they’ve been talking about using various microorganisms to eat eway the plastic for twenty years now, and nothing happened yet.
worthless idea, anything created that eats plastic will become a frankenstein and consume/attack every living thing with plastic particles, ie every plant, person, animal, everything on the planet will be a consumable to these microorganisms.
just like global warming being nature driven, dumbazz wanna be scientists don’t enen see that global warming was/is caused by the earth being tilted off axis 3 times in the last 20yrs, and the planet loosing 3.4 seconds per day, and ALL Climate Scientists saying that all predicted models as of the Tonga 2022 earthquake, and no longer fits their hypothesis/models. now with Myanmar 2025 earthquake it’s all up in the air, with that axis tilt.
World’s about to get spanked