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from the comment-on-this-web-zone-if-you-want-a-pizza-roll dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
These fly larvae really know how to demolish a pizza
It all started with the can't-tear-your-eyes-away video of black soldier fly larvae devouring a 16-inch pizza in just two hours. Watching sped-up action of the writhing mass inspired mechanical engineer Olga Shishkov of Georgia Tech in Atlanta to see what makes these insects such champions of collective feeding.
An individual Hermetia illucens larva doesn't eat steadily, Shishkov found. One feeds for about five minutes on average and then stops for about another five. As a group of thousands, though, they flow continuously like a living fountain splashing up against the edge of their food, Shishkov and colleagues report February 6 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
[...] As larvae took a break from binging, the hungry crowds pressing from behind forced them upward. Those at the top then fell away from cliff-face of food. This up-and-out push lets a larva eager to feed replace one that's taking a break.
The voracious feeding of black soldier fly larvae isn't just nature as entertainment. The larvae define edibility broadly — pizza, garbage, animal waste, it's all good. So people searching for ways to make food systems more sustainable wonder whether there's an opportunity to recapture what would usually be wasted by letting the larvae devour it and in turn, feeding them to chickens or other animals that people eat. That's certainly one reason to embrace a species that not only eat garbage but can handily murder a pizza. Also, Shiskov says, "they're the cutest maggots I've ever seen."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:57PM
The relevant Youtube search keywords are "BSF time lapse". Watching them devour food waste is entertaining.
A few data points from the last time I looked at these:
1. The Larvae ready to pupate will naturally climb away from food sources and their brethren to avoid being eaten. That means a clever enclosure can make them self harvesting.
2. They don't like cold weather. In the usually mild winter here in Tennessee they die.
3. They are much more tolerant of input material variety than Earthworms. If I feed a bag of moldy oranges to Earthworms the pH change can kill a bunch of them. BSF don't care.
4. The flying adults are visually disconcerting, but don't bite or eat. They reproduce and die.
5. Chickens find the Larvae and Pupae very palatable and will stalk an unattended drop tube of a BSF Digester.
6. They can digest some paper, but not significant quantities like Earthworms.
7. They do not appear to share mealworms' ability to eat and digest expanded polystyrene foam.