Caterpillars that eat plastic!! Have you ever heard of such a thing? The amazing fact is yes it does!! On 24th April, the scientific world was given reason to be excited with a publication in the Journal Current Biology about how caterpillars were discovered gorging on plastic. Well if that is a regular thing, the world’s pollution problems regarding plastic will now be solved.
The accidental discovery was made by scientist and bee keeper Federica Bertocchini of the institute o Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain. She was actually a bit annoyed to see one of her beehives crawling with wax worms so she cleaned the beehive and placed the worms in a plastic bag. It isn’t hard to guess what happened.
After going out and returning she found the plastic bag full of holes and worms crawling all over her room. The worms had eaten their way out of the bag. This led to a thorough scientific investigation which found that these caterpillars that eat plastic were a one-moment affair. Scientists in Cambridge England found that they were plastic eating worms which meant further research can be now conducted to use them against plastic pollution that floods the oceans worldwide.
It took the worms just 40 minutes to shred a plastic shopping bag and in 4 hours 13% of the bag had been eaten.
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Scientist’s found that the worms had digestive compounds in them that enabled them to digest plastic. One of these was ethylene glycol which was used in plastic degradation. These caterpillars called wax worms are used in fishing and regularly lay their eggs and infest beehives wreaking havoc by eating into them like parasites.
Polythene plastic is also found in landfills and garbage dumps in huge numbers and takes almost 400 years to degrade. Consider this!! 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed by people worldwide in a year. The demand of plastic is 45 million plastic tons a year.
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The biggest disadvantage of breeding caterpillars that eat plastic is the potential damage they can cause to beehives which would be a huge dent on the ecosystem. Waxworms cause about 4 million pounds of damage in the US alone.
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Scientists are now trying to locate the actual ingredient within the digestive system of wax worms which degrades plastic. If this was possible then the bacteria could be reproduced in vats without even depending on the worms. The scientists are now being wished a lot of luck to make this pathbreaking discovery that would not only reduce plastic pollution but keep the ecosystem intact as well.
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