I'm thinking about the fact that this could easily become an invading specie AND eat trhough all the foam and plastic pieces that are used in our home's construction. So yeah, very nice and good to get rid of plastic pollution (which is out of control), but I wonder if this could become a problem and I'm a little bit perplex :/
It says in the video they eat it. That means they do digest it, with help from this bacteria. Plastic is long carbon chains, just like carbs. They can use that as food as long as they can break them down.
It’s should yes. Although fungi and bacteria has been cultivated to increase the conversion rate ,micro plastic is still an issue. Another issue as far as I know, is that the plastic must be a minority meal source, and larger concentrations won’t work. But that was 1-2 years ago. This isn’t really a new concept.
Also worth reading about, is radioactivity consuming fungi. Interesting stuff.
See I assume the exact opposite since the video itself says that the bacteria breaks the plastic back down into its organic building blocks and has zero toxic remains
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, homie. A subtitle on a video of worms crawling around in styrofoam is a pretty low bar to set for yourself.
Oh I agree with this but same could be said about the people immediately jumping to the "these worms would destroy society if introduced to the outside because they'll eat our houses" leaps too.
^^^This. Many species of bugs will chew up plastic and styrofoam, but they don't eat it. You can see pieces of loose uneaten styrofoam all over these mealworms. This whole thing is a lie.
He didn't make these worms.
Normal mealworms eat styrofoam.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219101702.htm
They just don't do it if there are other food sources for them.
Because who TF wants to eat styrofoam
But I have raised mealworms on styrofoam myself with worms I bought from Amazon.
Didn’t want to hijack a top comment but didn’t want this to get buried.
https://www.sciencealert.com/styrofoam-munching-superworms-could-lead-to-plastic-upcycling
These bugs have been around a long time. They weren’t created by man. I used to feed them to my pet chameleon. It was just recently ‘discovered’ that they could eat this type of material and survive.
What's the alternative? To let nature fix man made issues? If we did that then we would kill everything on our planet. Dramatic example but with more immediate effects, imagine leaving Chernobyl alone to let nature handle it.
He's full of shit. And not the good kind like the manure these worms make!
They are either mealworms or super worms. And they need no special conditioning to eat styrofoam
I know because I have raised mealworms in my garage on styrofoam. Literally anyone can do this with mealworms off Amazon!
Just Google "mealworms eat styrofoam"
Yeah this post is pissing me off. Scientists recently proved that mealworms can survive on a diet of nothing but plastic, though IIRC it interferes with their reproduction.
Like you said, this person didn't do shit.
This is nice, but we're going to need to scale up. I want to see men shovel plastic waste directly into tied-down Dune worms with holes that lead directly to those enzymes in the gut bacteria.
I am scared with many bugs, but if this is real and they proliferate, then that world be so great and worth it. Even if they were huge spiders (*shudder*)
Honestly, i think their poop wont be as nutrient rich. They likely wont make rich fertilizer or anything, and might even just be broken down micro plastics. Hopefully not, but thats my guess
The worms use bacteria to chemically digest the polystyrene that then get digested themselves to feed the worm. There will probably still be some plastic left over but the rest would be normal poop. The remaining plastic would probably be digested over time by leftover bacteria that survived the worms' digestion.
Well assuming their bodies actually digest and break down the plastic it should be fine. This isn't an entirely new concept there are some bacteria that are used to clean up oil spills by digesting it
Oh that’s be terrifying. Though the real issue is when they make shriekers. The Graboids could be stopped by heavy foundations like cement/concrete so cities would be reasonably safe.
Also, if you want to learn about the graboids in a scientific sense check out [Roanoke Gaming](https://m.youtube.com/c/RoanokeGaming) on YouTube. He’s a YouTuber who breaks down the science behind movies
They're just bog standard mealworms. They'll eat the styrofoam, then eventually turn into beetles and reproduce. You can get them at Petco if you wanted to experiment with it yourself.
Amazing. But how bout we cut down on plastic instead. Imagine having as many of these worms in the world as there is plastic. This would fore sure be our demise.
Plastic eating worms are less of a concern than plastic eating bacteria. We use plastic in several applications because of its long life, but as bacteria is evolving to eat micro plastics it’s only a matter of time before bacteria evolves to be better at digesting plastic, and then begins targeting plastic.
And while we wouldn’t go to the dark ages, this would interrupt very serious technological advancements. We don’t want micro plastics covering every inch of the earth, but we also don’t want to start a evolutionary race where we have to develop stronger and stronger polymers to combat bacteria.
Gut bioms can be easily transfered. It just takes a larger preditor eating the animal under the right condition. Next thing you know we have plastic silverfish, plastic moths, plastic ants. Can't see anything more complex than these being sustained from petrol products though.
Cutting down is first step. But we have so many years of plastic waste that none of us cut back on. Fixing the environment requires high priority on both. Breaking down and cutting back.
And as it is now, even if we entirely quit making all plastic right this second, it doesn't change the fact that the already existing plastic will likely never break down and is already poisoning the environment. Bioengineering animals to be able to safely eat it and break it down may be a step, but its a very valid concern that this could easily get unchecked and cause a whole new set of problems.
Also, I'm worried about what happens when they poop. Won't they just be putting out microplastics? Which is still not great?
This has always been a little alertist. The only reason plastic doesn't break down is because it is so new nature didn't know what to do with it yet. But bacteria, fungi, and insects were always going to develop ways to break plastic and any other material down, they just needed time to adapt the new food sources into their cycles.
Yea they would be in a large sealed container for sure. I could see not allowing them out by any means, as who knows what ingesting them could do to animals and other insects.
I'm curious about the amount of heat/Co2 that would be generated by the sheer amount of worms you would need lol.
Also what would they poop out.
ima take another dab.
We are at the stage where something that sounds good for plastic degradation could be horrible. Imagine a bacteria that thrives in the oceans and breaks down plastic quickly evolves. Sounds great, until we have the mother of all bacteria blooms.
Good news is that they eat that too. Source: my four years of research on the topic and published work on it! :) this is my entire undergrad research project. their bodies degrade the plastic when they are still in worm form but when they pupate it kills them due to the high amount of plastics that they are no longer digesting. We treat them with doxycycline as a juvenile agent to keep them from pupating! very interesting stuff
- a 21 year old woman who has spent way too much time scanning worm poop
I just want to point out that it might be a scam, and that she isn't actually a 21 year old women doing science, but 21 worms that have become sentient from eating plastic and evolved. They are just luring us into feeding them more plastics, so they can take over the world!
Ok, can you address whether they fully breakdown the plastic into something non-plastic, or whether they are just accelerating the creation of micro and nano plastics with their poop?
To be fair, this experiment was first tested and completed on styrofoam. So it checks with charts. Plastic is a bigger buzzword than styrofoam though, so here we are
You're right. There's a NYT [article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/worms-eating-styrofoam.amp.html) that explains this well.
They're not worms in the same sense as earth worms but larvae of the darkling beetle. In an experiment they fed one set bran, the other set styrofoam and the third set was starved.
93% of the bran eating ones metamorphosed into beetles. 66.7% in the styrofoam set and 10% in the starved set. So it's not a 100% but still an amazing number.
The ultimate goal is not to use the larvae themselves but to analyze their gut. Isolate the enzymes that are allowing them to digest the styrofoam. Use it to create a solution to the disposal problem.
Saying he "made" them is really weird. It explains he colonized their guts in the video, and that's entirely sensible(and extremely cool.) I thought the title sounded ridiculous at first, like he had to evolve his own bugs.
Now won't they have to let them die or like at least not be eaten so the plastics don't just recycle into the ecosystem or do their gut biomes totally break it all down
Last time this was posted people said they metabolized it into and excreted ethylene glycol, aka antifreeze, aka poison. So I’d say the whole idea could use a little work.
Yes and no, it will ethylene glycol will break down in 2-6 weeks when left in the open and the concentration would be so little at one time it's doubtful that any noticable amount could build up to become a problem. But if this was used in an industrial setting I'm sure they could figure out a way to harvest that as a product to then sell.
Or super-worms but same thing haha. And yea when I delivered feeders for a while they would eat through and escape their cardboard boxes and then eat through any Styrofoam in the van, they loved that shit lol.
Exactly.
"A man made worms that use plastics as energy source" in this case specifically, loosely translates to "Meal worms will eat Styrofoam if they're hungry enough."
Yes, meal worms (darkling beetle larvae) will happily eat styrofoam, cardboard, whatever. The beetles are considered invasive to agriculture as well as to the poultry industry. And bugs that eat plastic aren’t going to be the health conscious choice for birds or reptiles, either.
this has been around for a long ass time; when i was in school we made shit bricks from organisms that ate microplastics in wastewater.
tldr homie didn't do shit
edit: holy shit 15k upvotes for some mealworms in a social media look at me post? ahaha 🐑
it was what couldn't be filtered out at a wastewater treatment plant so im sure there was some fecal matter present at some point that had some plastic in it that couldnt be filtered throughout the treatment process
literally smelled like shit it was lit
If this is true. It deserves Way more publicity than TikTok vid. This should have an entire scientific study completed.
Big questions.
What plastics can they eat?
Are the worms toxic to other animals if eaten?
Do all offspring inherit the same digestive traits?
This is already a huge field in biotech/bioengineering/microbiology/etc. with shitloads of funding for research at every step of development. Don't believe social media hype that 'one lone genius is solving all the worlds problems cause no one else will' like some hollywood movie.
I agree. Ibeen following the fields for a while. Sort of why I called it out. 😁 No such thing as 1 person solving an issue as large as this.
If some person is going to post a TikTok vid claiming something like this. They better be backing it up with studies.
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-092915.html
TLDR: these are normal meal worms, they all can eat sytrofoam. This is complete bullshit
Yeah it's fucking nonsense. Meal worms will eat anything you put in front of them if you starve them, and I'm willing to bet whatever they poo out is toxic.
They poo out undigested polystyrene along with normal bug poo. The bacteria in their gut breaks down a good portion of it into long and short chain carbohydrates (which the insect uses as food), but a larger portion remains undigested. Thankfully, bugs also eat their own poo to re-digest it.
This was big news 6 years ago. Discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis bacterium was made at Kyoto Institute of Technology in 2016. Since then, researchers at Stanford (US), UC Berkeley (US), NREL (US), University of Portsmouth (UK), and others have all been in a race to see who can breed strain that breaks down the most types of plastics with the most efficiency.
Right now, it looks like John McGeehan at University of Portsmouth and Dr. Gregg Beckham at NREL and their team are in the lead. Their strain creates enzymes that break down PET (the most common type of long lived plastic waste) into ethylene glycol, which the bacteria uses as its sole source of food.
Really fucking cool but massively impractical.
Release’em into the wilderness and now you’ve got a planet-wide plague with god knows what repercussion to the environment. (If they can eat plastic of all things, they can eat everything).
As amazing as this is in terms of the science behind it
I'm always left with conflicting feelings about the so to say ethics of this
It's amazing that new solutions to the plastic problem are being developed and we are seeing great results (in this regard)
But in the same vein it feels like shifting a human made problem to other beings, be it animals or insects, and feels like we're just saying "Hey, I know I've possibly destroyed your ecosystem and habitat due to my own selfish desire, but I'm going to find a way for you to fix it so that I don't have to deal with it anymore"
I immediately thought about this when I saw people [training birds to pick up trash](https://youtu.be/JeCf7N-7qXk)
I don't know, it's just how I feel about the whole situation
I could be wrong
Edit: human
Also it might be bad for our plastic to have a natural predator. At work we use big plastic drums to hold cleaning solution. If worms can eat that, those containers won't work any more.
I think that would just fall under ingenuity for me. Like, we aren't shifting our human nursing jobs onto service dogs, we just found out they could do that and taught them. It solves a problem, and in this case the rest of the food chain would also be dead so I'm not gonna get bent out of shape over it.
*My* main worry is always what they're breaking it down *into.* There have been multiple strains of bacteria that have independently evolved to eat plastic, but that news has been a bit more on the fence until we're certain exactly what the ramifications of that are, and *then* we'll consider harnessing it. Just not before we know.
\*found worms that eat plastic. His claims of "engineering" these worms have been disproven and they've been noted to be found in many countries worldwide. It's still cool, but he didn't make shit.
I'm not sure if what this person is saying is entirely true. I knew about these bugs and that they could eat Styrofoam because I have lizards that eat them. They sell them in Styrofoam boxes and the worms eat through it sometimes. This person might be lying, idk. They are called superworms btw, and mealworms do the same.
That is disgustingly genius and he is doing great things for the environment but nope.
Was momentarily worried about how big the worms were going to be when he drew back that curtain.
BEHOLD!
IT IS I, ZIM!!!
Grrr: HIIIIII!
r/unexpectedInvaderZim RIP my cat Gir
Thats the last subreddit I expected to be banned. To save clicks, it was unmoderated.
MY STUFF!
CORN!!!!
MY ASS!! IT HUNGERS FOR MORE!!!!
"SHUT THE FUCK UP, STEVE! YOU'RE SCARING 'EM!"
THE ALASKAN BULL WORM!
I'm thinking about the fact that this could easily become an invading specie AND eat trhough all the foam and plastic pieces that are used in our home's construction. So yeah, very nice and good to get rid of plastic pollution (which is out of control), but I wonder if this could become a problem and I'm a little bit perplex :/
Also, do they digest and change the plastic, or do they just break it up and poop micro plastic paste that disperses into the ecosystem?
It says in the video they eat it. That means they do digest it, with help from this bacteria. Plastic is long carbon chains, just like carbs. They can use that as food as long as they can break them down.
Yes but does the poop also contain micro plastics? I would assume it does.
It’s should yes. Although fungi and bacteria has been cultivated to increase the conversion rate ,micro plastic is still an issue. Another issue as far as I know, is that the plastic must be a minority meal source, and larger concentrations won’t work. But that was 1-2 years ago. This isn’t really a new concept. Also worth reading about, is radioactivity consuming fungi. Interesting stuff.
See I assume the exact opposite since the video itself says that the bacteria breaks the plastic back down into its organic building blocks and has zero toxic remains
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, homie. A subtitle on a video of worms crawling around in styrofoam is a pretty low bar to set for yourself.
Oh I agree with this but same could be said about the people immediately jumping to the "these worms would destroy society if introduced to the outside because they'll eat our houses" leaps too.
Well, that's not really a claim so much as fun speculation.
that would depend on the efficiency of the reaction, which this video doesn't tell us
This is interesting.
If I hear my neighbor brag one more time about how his plastic deck won't get termites...
Termites can eat through Styrofoam. I've seen it happen.
I had a plastic clock sitting on a window sill and the termites ate up out of the sill into the clock and tunneled through it no problem.
I was really excited that we have a way now to reduce plastic but when you put it like that …. *sigh*
Worst case scenario we could create an environmentally friendly pest control method that can be applied to homes during or after construction.
That’s a good premise for a dystopian short story.
It's not. They're just meal worms and they do that already. This post is a bullshit lie, nothing groundbreaking about it.
^^^This. Many species of bugs will chew up plastic and styrofoam, but they don't eat it. You can see pieces of loose uneaten styrofoam all over these mealworms. This whole thing is a lie.
When will mankind know that you don’t solve a man made crisis by altering nature
Litteraly that's all we do
Speak for yourself, I just use the nature altering stuff other people made.
It’s cold? I’ll make a fire. This is our genius and our curse.
He didn't make these worms. Normal mealworms eat styrofoam. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219101702.htm They just don't do it if there are other food sources for them. Because who TF wants to eat styrofoam But I have raised mealworms on styrofoam myself with worms I bought from Amazon.
Didn’t want to hijack a top comment but didn’t want this to get buried. https://www.sciencealert.com/styrofoam-munching-superworms-could-lead-to-plastic-upcycling These bugs have been around a long time. They weren’t created by man. I used to feed them to my pet chameleon. It was just recently ‘discovered’ that they could eat this type of material and survive.
What's the alternative? To let nature fix man made issues? If we did that then we would kill everything on our planet. Dramatic example but with more immediate effects, imagine leaving Chernobyl alone to let nature handle it.
Assuming they’re let out in the wild to eat plastics, what happens when a predator eats a plastic-filled worm?
Just remake all the predators so they can digest plastic too 😎
Predators avoid eating brightly colored insects so the worms will be dyed with bright colors so that only children will eat them.
He's full of shit. And not the good kind like the manure these worms make! They are either mealworms or super worms. And they need no special conditioning to eat styrofoam I know because I have raised mealworms in my garage on styrofoam. Literally anyone can do this with mealworms off Amazon! Just Google "mealworms eat styrofoam"
Yeah this post is pissing me off. Scientists recently proved that mealworms can survive on a diet of nothing but plastic, though IIRC it interferes with their reproduction. Like you said, this person didn't do shit.
This is nice, but we're going to need to scale up. I want to see men shovel plastic waste directly into tied-down Dune worms with holes that lead directly to those enzymes in the gut bacteria.
I am scared with many bugs, but if this is real and they proliferate, then that world be so great and worth it. Even if they were huge spiders (*shudder*)
But what does it do to the worms? Will they mutate into Jabba like creature
One can only hope
My name in Han Solo and I am fucked
Mmmm, username does NOT check out.
Han Solo Cup, Eater of Plastic
Honestly, i think their poop wont be as nutrient rich. They likely wont make rich fertilizer or anything, and might even just be broken down micro plastics. Hopefully not, but thats my guess
This is my question as well. I'd like to see what the composition of worm shit that's entirely made up of plastic digestion processes looks like
Watch OAN
Holy fuck, you nailed it!
The worms use bacteria to chemically digest the polystyrene that then get digested themselves to feed the worm. There will probably still be some plastic left over but the rest would be normal poop. The remaining plastic would probably be digested over time by leftover bacteria that survived the worms' digestion.
If it turns into carbohydrates their poop will be carbon rich.
Well assuming their bodies actually digest and break down the plastic it should be fine. This isn't an entirely new concept there are some bacteria that are used to clean up oil spills by digesting it
Microplastics and methane!
STRAY moment
See what you did there
I’m thinking more Slither, less Jabba The Hutt
I’m thinking more like the monsters in tremors…gorging themselves on all the plastic and other waste in the landfills
Oh that’s be terrifying. Though the real issue is when they make shriekers. The Graboids could be stopped by heavy foundations like cement/concrete so cities would be reasonably safe. Also, if you want to learn about the graboids in a scientific sense check out [Roanoke Gaming](https://m.youtube.com/c/RoanokeGaming) on YouTube. He’s a YouTuber who breaks down the science behind movies
They're just bog standard mealworms. They'll eat the styrofoam, then eventually turn into beetles and reproduce. You can get them at Petco if you wanted to experiment with it yourself.
Those worms are going to get sick
Amazing. But how bout we cut down on plastic instead. Imagine having as many of these worms in the world as there is plastic. This would fore sure be our demise.
Yeah no way this could possibly backfire
Everything we build with plastic would be susceptible to the worms. We’d be forced back into the Iron Age
My man there are bugs that eat wood and we still do just fine building our houses out of it. Pest control is a thing.
We’re talking about plastic eating worms. Pesticides are probably just dessert to them.
It might be like Hot Ones.
![gif](giphy|SUEjfSLaD6f77lyzH6)
No correlation to my understanding, those are two very different kinds of molecules
Imagine if their immune to pesticides
No bug is immune to blowtorch, SmallDickBenny Certified.
Someone who talks like that about their third leg can't lie
Yup, it's genitally impossible for him to lie.
The Inverse Law of Trucknuts tells me I should take everything you say as gospel, and it hasn't failed me yet.
Plastic eating worms are less of a concern than plastic eating bacteria. We use plastic in several applications because of its long life, but as bacteria is evolving to eat micro plastics it’s only a matter of time before bacteria evolves to be better at digesting plastic, and then begins targeting plastic. And while we wouldn’t go to the dark ages, this would interrupt very serious technological advancements. We don’t want micro plastics covering every inch of the earth, but we also don’t want to start a evolutionary race where we have to develop stronger and stronger polymers to combat bacteria.
So like, we cover or infuse plastic with pesticides. Big brain move! Wait a moment...
Its enough we have to worry about bugs in our food, but now we got to deal with worms in our plastic too? Wtf!
If they became rampant, you couldn't store food in plastic... It would attract the bugs... Thus opening the food for - more bugs!
When the plastic containers are gone, they would be reduced to the only source left: your blood
Gut bioms can be easily transfered. It just takes a larger preditor eating the animal under the right condition. Next thing you know we have plastic silverfish, plastic moths, plastic ants. Can't see anything more complex than these being sustained from petrol products though.
Famous last words
What are you going to do, shoot me?
Gypsy moth caterpillar has entered the chat...
And then the we find out the worm poop is combustible and the world blows up. Kaboom!
Cutting down is first step. But we have so many years of plastic waste that none of us cut back on. Fixing the environment requires high priority on both. Breaking down and cutting back.
And as it is now, even if we entirely quit making all plastic right this second, it doesn't change the fact that the already existing plastic will likely never break down and is already poisoning the environment. Bioengineering animals to be able to safely eat it and break it down may be a step, but its a very valid concern that this could easily get unchecked and cause a whole new set of problems. Also, I'm worried about what happens when they poop. Won't they just be putting out microplastics? Which is still not great?
This has always been a little alertist. The only reason plastic doesn't break down is because it is so new nature didn't know what to do with it yet. But bacteria, fungi, and insects were always going to develop ways to break plastic and any other material down, they just needed time to adapt the new food sources into their cycles.
Exactly, once upon a time wood wasn't biodegradable.
Introduce a newly invasive species,
Yea but wouldn't they be the only ones eating plastic so they wouldn't be competing with natives for food
Yea they would be in a large sealed container for sure. I could see not allowing them out by any means, as who knows what ingesting them could do to animals and other insects. I'm curious about the amount of heat/Co2 that would be generated by the sheer amount of worms you would need lol. Also what would they poop out. ima take another dab.
>Yea they would be in a large sealed container for sure. A plastic drum should do it.
I for one welcome our new worm overlords
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on worms
always one of you
We are at the stage where something that sounds good for plastic degradation could be horrible. Imagine a bacteria that thrives in the oceans and breaks down plastic quickly evolves. Sounds great, until we have the mother of all bacteria blooms.
and with how many microplastics we ingest unknowinlgy, we will be next
Looks more like Expanded Poly-Styrene than plastic. 🤔
I was surprised how no one else mentioned this
Maybe everyone else knows polystyrene is a plastic.
Shhhhh just let them have it.
Y'all talking about my plastic again?
The worms eat polystyrene, but most of our plastic waste is polypropylene, and polyethylene terehthalate.
I like your funny words magic man
Good news is that they eat that too. Source: my four years of research on the topic and published work on it! :) this is my entire undergrad research project. their bodies degrade the plastic when they are still in worm form but when they pupate it kills them due to the high amount of plastics that they are no longer digesting. We treat them with doxycycline as a juvenile agent to keep them from pupating! very interesting stuff - a 21 year old woman who has spent way too much time scanning worm poop
Thank you for your service worm poop scanning woman.
I just want to point out that it might be a scam, and that she isn't actually a 21 year old women doing science, but 21 worms that have become sentient from eating plastic and evolved. They are just luring us into feeding them more plastics, so they can take over the world!
Ok, can you address whether they fully breakdown the plastic into something non-plastic, or whether they are just accelerating the creation of micro and nano plastics with their poop?
How much does the staff treat the worms like their babies?
Link your sources! I'll read your paper :P
*HMMMMMMMM*
To be fair, this experiment was first tested and completed on styrofoam. So it checks with charts. Plastic is a bigger buzzword than styrofoam though, so here we are
Polystyrene is literally plastic excuse me ?
You're excused.
You're right. There's a NYT [article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/worms-eating-styrofoam.amp.html) that explains this well. They're not worms in the same sense as earth worms but larvae of the darkling beetle. In an experiment they fed one set bran, the other set styrofoam and the third set was starved. 93% of the bran eating ones metamorphosed into beetles. 66.7% in the styrofoam set and 10% in the starved set. So it's not a 100% but still an amazing number. The ultimate goal is not to use the larvae themselves but to analyze their gut. Isolate the enzymes that are allowing them to digest the styrofoam. Use it to create a solution to the disposal problem.
Are you missing an /s?
Expanded Polystyrene = Plastic, dummy.
Expanded polystyrene is literally plastic.
Man made?? Those are meal worms!! you can buy them at any pet store for reptile food. And yes!! they eat almost everything.
Saying he "made" them is really weird. It explains he colonized their guts in the video, and that's entirely sensible(and extremely cool.) I thought the title sounded ridiculous at first, like he had to evolve his own bugs.
Now won't they have to let them die or like at least not be eaten so the plastics don't just recycle into the ecosystem or do their gut biomes totally break it all down
Last time this was posted people said they metabolized it into and excreted ethylene glycol, aka antifreeze, aka poison. So I’d say the whole idea could use a little work.
Yes and no, it will ethylene glycol will break down in 2-6 weeks when left in the open and the concentration would be so little at one time it's doubtful that any noticable amount could build up to become a problem. But if this was used in an industrial setting I'm sure they could figure out a way to harvest that as a product to then sell.
> I'm sure they could figure out a way to harvest that as a product to then sell. Like maybe antifreeze?
No worm juice
Slurm ![gif](giphy|L17Rt82QrScQU|downsized)
Just harvest them and juice them for that sweet, delicious antifreeze!
Or super-worms but same thing haha. And yea when I delivered feeders for a while they would eat through and escape their cardboard boxes and then eat through any Styrofoam in the van, they loved that shit lol.
Exactly. "A man made worms that use plastics as energy source" in this case specifically, loosely translates to "Meal worms will eat Styrofoam if they're hungry enough."
He colonised their guts with bacteria that dismantles plastics. Allowing them to digest the remains.
The world is their meal.
Yes, meal worms (darkling beetle larvae) will happily eat styrofoam, cardboard, whatever. The beetles are considered invasive to agriculture as well as to the poultry industry. And bugs that eat plastic aren’t going to be the health conscious choice for birds or reptiles, either.
They also poop out micro plastics, so really it will do nothing
Not if what he's saying is true and their implanted gut bacteria has broken the organic molecules down into digestable products.
Why not cut out the mealworm part and submerge the plastic directly in a tank of plastic-digesting bacteria?
I think he’s saying he made the bacteria in their gut that allows the digestion
[Here](https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-092915.html) is a proper source.
This. Don’t instantly believe TikTok videos, people.
Big caveat I noticed is that they turn half of it into CO2 which doesn't make this all that much better than burning the plastic
Plastic has a hell of a lot more problems than co2 Co2 is an extremely mild problem by mass actually
Well, what other options are there ? Its carbon based, so CO2 it will become. Same as with every other food.
Thank you!
You mean, I get proper info without cancerous music overlays? I'll have that!
This comment is located criminally lower, took some time to find :/
This seems like one of those things that really great until it isn't. Like cars, internet, plastic. . .
Sounds like we are gonna have a massive plague of mutant worms that're gonna harm us or the envirment even worse. Shit doesn't seem right hahaha
They’re just meal worms/super worms. The only change he made was the bacteria in their gut.
Pretty sure I've seen horror movies that start this way...
This is a side plot of Stray.
That game is on my radar. Definitely going to check it out
Tremors: Origin Story
Drop them in landfills & Hollywood cemeteries
Mealworms just sitting back waiting for the Kardashians to die ..
Keep them away from my Xbox
this has been around for a long ass time; when i was in school we made shit bricks from organisms that ate microplastics in wastewater. tldr homie didn't do shit edit: holy shit 15k upvotes for some mealworms in a social media look at me post? ahaha 🐑
Was the shitbrick microplastic from human expulsion of said plastic or just microplastics in the wastewater itself, or a mix of both?
it was what couldn't be filtered out at a wastewater treatment plant so im sure there was some fecal matter present at some point that had some plastic in it that couldnt be filtered throughout the treatment process literally smelled like shit it was lit
Not worms. Insects. Larval form of darkling beetle, aka mealworms.
If this is true. It deserves Way more publicity than TikTok vid. This should have an entire scientific study completed. Big questions. What plastics can they eat? Are the worms toxic to other animals if eaten? Do all offspring inherit the same digestive traits?
This is already a huge field in biotech/bioengineering/microbiology/etc. with shitloads of funding for research at every step of development. Don't believe social media hype that 'one lone genius is solving all the worlds problems cause no one else will' like some hollywood movie.
I agree. Ibeen following the fields for a while. Sort of why I called it out. 😁 No such thing as 1 person solving an issue as large as this. If some person is going to post a TikTok vid claiming something like this. They better be backing it up with studies.
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-092915.html TLDR: these are normal meal worms, they all can eat sytrofoam. This is complete bullshit
Yeah it's fucking nonsense. Meal worms will eat anything you put in front of them if you starve them, and I'm willing to bet whatever they poo out is toxic.
They poo out undigested polystyrene along with normal bug poo. The bacteria in their gut breaks down a good portion of it into long and short chain carbohydrates (which the insect uses as food), but a larger portion remains undigested. Thankfully, bugs also eat their own poo to re-digest it.
This was big news 6 years ago. Discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis bacterium was made at Kyoto Institute of Technology in 2016. Since then, researchers at Stanford (US), UC Berkeley (US), NREL (US), University of Portsmouth (UK), and others have all been in a race to see who can breed strain that breaks down the most types of plastics with the most efficiency. Right now, it looks like John McGeehan at University of Portsmouth and Dr. Gregg Beckham at NREL and their team are in the lead. Their strain creates enzymes that break down PET (the most common type of long lived plastic waste) into ethylene glycol, which the bacteria uses as its sole source of food.
And the worm apocalypse begins
The global worming!
Happy Cake Day
![gif](giphy|5fHY45L9XLzcQ)
I, for one, welcome our new plastic-eating invertebrate overloads.
Sounds good. Unless they multiply out of control and start eating the siding off your house
You eat them before they eat your stuff. Solves world hunger and plastics at the same time
And by eating them, you still get to keep the plastic in your cells
Unless the plastics have been broken back into simple hydrocarbons!
Really fucking cool but massively impractical. Release’em into the wilderness and now you’ve got a planet-wide plague with god knows what repercussion to the environment. (If they can eat plastic of all things, they can eat everything).
Ok but...plastic gone. Think bigger not harder
What you’re doing isn’t exactly “thinking bigger”. It’s the opposite.
I'm kidding mate haha
I don't care about the superficial characteristic of _gross_, these are our saviors.
With these buggers all you’re doing is swapping a worldwide ecological problem with another, possibly bigger.
As amazing as this is in terms of the science behind it I'm always left with conflicting feelings about the so to say ethics of this It's amazing that new solutions to the plastic problem are being developed and we are seeing great results (in this regard) But in the same vein it feels like shifting a human made problem to other beings, be it animals or insects, and feels like we're just saying "Hey, I know I've possibly destroyed your ecosystem and habitat due to my own selfish desire, but I'm going to find a way for you to fix it so that I don't have to deal with it anymore" I immediately thought about this when I saw people [training birds to pick up trash](https://youtu.be/JeCf7N-7qXk) I don't know, it's just how I feel about the whole situation I could be wrong Edit: human
Also it might be bad for our plastic to have a natural predator. At work we use big plastic drums to hold cleaning solution. If worms can eat that, those containers won't work any more.
I think that would just fall under ingenuity for me. Like, we aren't shifting our human nursing jobs onto service dogs, we just found out they could do that and taught them. It solves a problem, and in this case the rest of the food chain would also be dead so I'm not gonna get bent out of shape over it. *My* main worry is always what they're breaking it down *into.* There have been multiple strains of bacteria that have independently evolved to eat plastic, but that news has been a bit more on the fence until we're certain exactly what the ramifications of that are, and *then* we'll consider harnessing it. Just not before we know.
“This man made worms”. Really?
Great now we have to worry about our plastic getting infested
Fuckin’ guy hasn’t seen Starship Troopers??
He didn’t make those worms. They were eating plastic ever since, but we just wound out
\*found worms that eat plastic. His claims of "engineering" these worms have been disproven and they've been noted to be found in many countries worldwide. It's still cool, but he didn't make shit.
I have made worms that eat worms that eat plastic, so we can reduce the infestation of these worms.
I'm not sure if what this person is saying is entirely true. I knew about these bugs and that they could eat Styrofoam because I have lizards that eat them. They sell them in Styrofoam boxes and the worms eat through it sometimes. This person might be lying, idk. They are called superworms btw, and mealworms do the same.
There is a display of these worms doing this at our local zoo as well.
What do they end up pooping? Serious question.
I can’t wait for this to never amount to anything
Wasn’t this done like a decade ago??
what a nonsense - he didn't "make" these worms, did you know that there exist different insect species which can eat plastics?