Polystyrene foam, aka the devil’s clamshell, aka the indestructible insulator, aka green public enemy No. 1…, may have finally met its match: mealworms….
That’s right. It turns out, those squirmy little grubs are more than just a hot menu item for entomophagy enthusiasts. They, too, have quite an appetite, and according to the Environmental News Network (ENN), that appetite happens to include Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene:
While this diet doesn’t sound remotely healthy for the worms, researchers have yet to identify any adverse effects. In comparison studies, mealworms that ate exclusively Styrofoam were equally as healthy as those that ate a more standard diet of bran. Researchers are currently in the process of verifying that families of worms that consume only plastic are still healthy generations from now. Additionally, they want to confirm that predators that eat mealworms remain healthy after consuming worms that eat Styrofoam.
Styrofoam and other polystyrene foam are poisonous to a lot of animals, so mealworms’ ability to digest them came as quite a surprise to scientists….
Half of the Styrofoam that mealworms eat turns into carbon dioxide, but half of whatever mealworms usually eat turns into carbon dioxide, ENN reports. The other half of the Styrofoam turns into “non-toxic poop pellets” that are safe to use as fertilizer. So as long as the mealworms remain healthy, and everything that eats the mealworms remains healthy, then this seems like a win-win-win.
………………………………………………
………………………………………………
Find out more at Grist.org…
Photo Credit: By Pengo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
