Buzzing: Here come the insect doctors
Hello everyone, I hope you had a good week. The big news this week is that the European Union has approved the sale of yellow mealworms in the bloc. Do try them, they’re my favourite!
This week in Buzzing:
Insect doctors
The Q&A: Chua Kai-Ning, Insectta
Test corner: Nearly there with the mealworms…
When I spoke to Amy Franklin of Farms for Orphans a few months back, she mentioned that as a trainee vet, insect medicine was not at all on her radar. Ironic considering that she now runs a honey bee vet business as well as palm weevil farming venture. As a lay person, I hadn’t even realised that it was even a branch of veterinary medicine: pets, farmed animals, wild animals, yes, but insects?
Yet insects like all other animals are subject to pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi) and even parasites such as mites. The advent of commercial farming makes it more likely that new pathogens may emerge but also that they could lead to extensive commercial losses.
Dr Helen Hesketh, a pathogen ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology gave a fascinating presentation on the matter at the Insects as Food & Feed conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s been known for a very long time that pathogens affect honey bees and silkworms (the oldest domesticated insects); more recently, scientists have used pathogens for the biological control of common crop pests such as the beet armyworm (Spodoptera exigua). But little is known about pathogens of insect species reared for food or feed; Dr Hesketh for instance indicated that there are no known viruses for the Black Soldier Fly (BSF), yet more than 60% of insect farmers in Europe farm BSF.
The EU therefore decided to set up a research programme called Insect Doctors to train the next cohort of insect pathologists. They have recruited 15 PhD students who have embarked on a European Joint Doctoral Programme funded by the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network. Crucially, Insect Doctors is bringing together academia and industry, with big insect farms such as Ÿnsect, Protifarm and Koppert Biological Systems taking part. Participants are studying several insect species so that research in one insect can, ahem, cross-pollinate research in another.
What struck me with this initiative is that it signals that insects as food and feed are way past “niche”: the EU would not be designing a doctoral programme in insect pathology if it didn’t think this was here to stay. I think it also sends a message that the industry is serious about biosafety and animal welfare.
Entomologists at the conference seemed thrilled to see “proper” science being funded in this area. As a consumer and observer, I think the message will help reassure consumers that insects reared for food or feed meet the same high standards as any other food or feed. Three cheers to that.
The Q&A: Chua Kai-Ning, co-founder & chief marketing officer at Insectta
The city state of Singapore produces just 1-2% of its food. Keen to improve its resilience, the government launched its “30 by 30” food strategy in 2018: to produce 30% of its food by 2030. Chua Kai-Ning and Phua Jun Wei thought the Black Soldier Fly could help by providing animal feed and fertiliser for crops so they founded Insectta, Singapore’s first Black Soldier Fly farm. Three years on however, their focus is now on insect-derived biomaterials for pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, which sounds as cool it is. Do read on.
Why did you pivot from conventional protein production to biomaterials?
We don’t really have the potential for mass production: Singapore doesn’t have the land or the labour force but what we do have is a very strong R&D pharmaceutical and biotech industry, so we decided to bank on that.
When it comes to insects, the parts are worth more than the whole. You can extract protein, oil and chitosan, you don’t have to choose. We are complementary to the supply chain. We want to increase the value, not compete.
What are biomaterials and how do insects fit into the picture?
Chitosan is a natural fibre found in the exoskeleton of insects. It has antimicrobial properties and is used as a drug delivery agent, for wound healing, in cosmetics etc. Melanin, a natural pigment, is conductive to electricity so we are working to use it as a supercapacitor in medical devices or in medical imaging.
Biomaterials are already known to biotech. What differentiates us is where they come from and how they are produced. At the moment, chitosan is made from crab and shrimp that are farmed or caught in the wild. And the extraction process is very polluting. What’s so innovative about insect biomaterials is that we are creating very high value materials from something that was once draining our economy and polluting our environment and BSF is the middleman. Middle bug!
What’s next for Insectta?
We are going to start our series A funding round. We are looking for strategic partners, academic or commercial, for our applications. We’ve got the extraction part done, the next step is to show the world what these biomaterials can do.
Test Corner: Mealworms STILL growing
It’s been nearly five months since I’ve had my Beobia mealworm kit. Happily, I’ve had no major disaster. Annoyingly, no major success either. It has now been 22 weeks since I settled my adult beetles into their tray and the first generation of mealworms are only just starting to look big enough to harvest. This must be some kind of record for slow growth (the kit manual said it would be 10-15 weeks).
And the wait is not over! My adult beetles have done well but the initial 300 have slowly whittled down to 30 or 40 (their life expectancy is three to four months), which means I will probably have to let most of that first generation pupate to ensure my colony keeps going. Once the cycle is a little more established however, I should only need to put aside a handful for repopulation.
In my defence, it’s been cold: the manual says that room temperature should be 20-22C, but I reckon the average temperature in our kitchen over the winter months was more like 17C. I’ve definitely noticed that their growth has accelerated as it’s got warmer: the mealworms in the second tray are fast catching up with those in the first.
On a positive note, my experiments with substrates are going well. I was keen to give the mealworms things that I wouldn’t eat myself (waste essentially). For the grain base, our friendly local brewery Wild Card let me have some of their spent brewer’s grain for free. The mealworms love it but I need to get better at dehydrating it.
As for fruit and veg, the mealworms are only getting scraps: bits of apple cores (plentiful in a house with two kids) work a treat, as do the end bits of carrots. Anything too wet like a discarded slice of cucumber, a pear core or a bit of banana are a no good though as they will mould.
The long of the short is that it will be a few more weeks until you read about something I cooked with my own mealworms!
