In this episode of the "How to Protect the Ocean" podcast, host Andrew Lewin discusses the pressing issue of plastic pollution and highlights a promising biological solution involving African mealworms.
The episode focuses on the Kenyan lesser mealworm, a larval form of the Alphitobius darkling beetle, which has shown the ability to break down polystyrene, commonly known as styrofoam. This capability is attributed to the unique microbes and bacteria in the mealworms' gut. Researchers are studying these gut bacteria to identify specific communities that facilitate the degradation of plastic materials.
Key findings from the research indicate that the mealworms can effectively digest polystyrene when provided with a nutrient-rich diet, such as bran, alongside the styrofoam. This balanced diet appears to enhance the production of the necessary bacteria and enzymes to break down plastic. The study revealed significant shifts in bacterial composition based on the mealworms' diet, suggesting that the gut microbiome adapts to optimize plastic degradation.
The episode emphasizes the potential of harnessing these naturally occurring bacteria and enzymes for large-scale applications in plastic waste management, particularly in regions like Africa, where plastic waste poses significant environmental challenges. By isolating and utilizing these microbial communities, there is hope for developing innovative methods to biologically process plastic waste, reducing reliance on harmful chemical recycling methods.
The podcast presents a hopeful perspective on using biological solutions, like the African mealworm, to combat plastic pollution and promote environmental conservation.
Link to article: https://theconversation.com/plastic-eating-insect-discovered-in-kenya-242787
Follow a career in conservation:
https://www.conservation-careers.com/online-training/ Use the code SUFB to get 33% off courses and the careers program. Do you want to join my Ocean Community? Sign Up for Updates on the process:
www.speakupforblue.com/oceanapp Sign up for our Newsletter:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/newsletter Facebook Group:
https://bit.ly/3NmYvsI Connect with Speak Up For Blue: Website: https://bit.ly/3fOF3Wf Instagram: https://bit.ly/3rIaJSG TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@speakupforblue Twitter: https://bit.ly/3rHZxpc YouTube: www.speakupforblue.com/youtube
Plastic pollution is a problem, whether it's on land, whether it's in fresh water, whether it is in the ocean. It is a problem all over the world, everybody's experiencing it, and we continue to use single-use plastics like there isn't a problem. We continue to put out billions and billions of pounds of plastics each and every year into the ocean, affecting and killing over hundreds of thousands of animals in the ocean, including sharks, including whales and dolphins and seabirds and so forth, and it's just not helping. We need to figure out ways to stop it. There are ways to recycle certain plastics like polystyrene in a chemical and physical way that we do in a waste management plant, but that also produces a lot of toxins and it's very expensive, so not everybody is willing to pay for it. I know here in Canada and even in Ontario where I live, it's just starting to come on where we're seeing more and more recycling happen of styrofoam, but certain regions may not have the capacity to take it. So, we need to find better ways of recycling these things, and we may have actually found it in an African mealwork. Yes, an insect, a larval, a mealworm that is able to break down polystyrene, so that means styrofoam products because of the microbes and bacteria in their gut. We're going to talk about how that happens and what we need to do about it to really bring it to scale and allow mass production of this, of these enzymes and these microbes on this episode of How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. This is a podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And this is the place, if this is the first time you've been here, this is the place where you find out everything you need to know about the ocean, ocean news. You can find out how to speak up for the ocean. We have vlogs, we have podcasts, I have Ocean Talk, we do a lot of different things on our YouTube channel. We have podcasts all about oceans. And if you want to get them all in one place, you can go to our website, SpeakUpForBlue.com. That's www.SpeakUpForBlue.com. And if you want that information to your inbox, the latest podcast, the latest videos that we do, the latest news and the latest job ads, you can get that. If you just go to SpeakUpForBlue.com/newsletter, that's SpeakUpForBlue.com/newsletter. Put it in your email, it's all free. You get into your inbox Monday to Friday. I can't wait to see you there. I'd love to hear what you think of the newsletter. Let me know just by responding and it goes right to me and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But let's get into the episode. This is an interesting one. You know, I've heard a lot about biological ways of breaking down plastics, how that could be the way to move. And there's two real big things that we need to do to ensure that these persist, like this type of innovation persist. One, we need to protect biodiversity on land and in the water, whether it's fresh water or ocean. We need to make sure that biodiversity is protected because you never know when you find a larval mealworm that can actually break down styrofoam. You won't know this if we allow all this destruction of our biodiversity on land, in the water, to allow it to happen. And we can miss out on these amazing ways to innovate and help ourselves as a human race to be able to have less waste and less of an effect because of our waste on the planet. So having a good protection of biodiversity, there was just a convention on parties for biological diversity last week. We talked a little bit about that. There needs to be more that needs to be done. There's an international convention of biodiversity treaty that's in place and a lot of countries aren't really putting their money where their mouth is in terms of that protection. They're trying, not trying hard enough as usual, so that more needs to be done to protect biodiversity. The other thing is we need to start putting these animals and putting the stuff that we learned from these animals to scale so that we can actually break down plastic faster. And in this case, this was an African mealworm that was done on a study with the person who's writing this article in the conversation is Fethia Thomas. She's a senior scientist at International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology at the Australian Center for International Agriculture Research. And that was what it was funded by. But this is a really interesting study. So essentially, the study that they've looked at, they looked at the larvae of the Kenyan lesser mealworm that can chew through polystyrene, which is styrofoam, and host bacteria in their guts that help break down the material. So the lesser mealworm is the larvae from the alphitobias darkling beetle. The larvae period lasts about 8 to 10 weeks. The lesser mealworm are mostly found in poultry rearing houses, which are warm and can offer constant food supply, ideal conditions for them to grow and reproduce. Now they are thought to have originated in Africa, these lesser mealworms. They can be found though in many other countries around the world. The species that they've identified in this study, however, could be a subspecies of the alphitobias genus, but they're still trying to conduct research to be able to detect that. But the study also examined the insects gut bacteria, and they want to identify bacterial communities that may support the plastic degradation process. So if they can support that, then they can find out what the bacteria is and what the enzymes they use. Maybe they don't necessarily need the lesser mealworm because it'd be weird to just take a bunch of mealworms and just throw them into a landfill or throw them into a recycling plant. That'd be a really creepy and weird, I think, to do that. So I think what the goal is to extract and understand the bacterial communities that allow and foster this degradation in the gut of the mealworms and as well as the enzymes that they produce to be able to do that. So by studying these natural plastic eaters, they hope to create these new tools that can help get rid of plastic waste faster and more efficiently. So some of the key findings that they had was that when they fed the larvae different types of diet, so one was they just fed them polystyrene alone, so styrofoam type products. The other one was a mixture, or the other one was just a brand, which is like a nutrient dense food, that was just that. And then they did a combination of polystyrene and brand. They found that the efficiency and the breakdown was 11.7% of the total polystyrene when they had the balanced diet. So they realized that you still need a nutrient-rich diet for these mealworms to maybe they're thinking to produce the actual bacteria and the enzymes in their gut so that they can break down the bacteria or the polystyrene material, because when it was just polystyrene material diet, they just didn't do it as efficiently and they didn't last as long. So the scientists want to make sure that if you are using mealworms or you were trying to find out what fosters this type of bacteria that allows this bacteria to survive in the gut is maybe have a diverse and nutrient-rich food. So that was kind of cool. Now they did notice that in the gut, the gut bacteria reveals significant shifts in bacterial composition depending on the diet. So understanding these shifts in the composition is crucial because it reveals which microbes are actively involved in breaking down the plastics. So this that would help them isolate the specific bacteria and the enzymes that can be harnessed. So what they're thinking is if you're just having a polystyrene diet, there could be specific bacteria in there. Or if you're doing the combination, it could make it could help produce that bacteria that would make sure that these polystyrene material breaks down the material. And it could mean that the bacteria, depending on what's available in terms of food, might change in order to serve the mealworm better. So what they noticed in the larvae, they found that they contain higher levels of proteobacteria and fermicutes bacteria that can adapt to a number of various environments and break down a wide range of complex substances. The bacteria such as a Chloivera, Lactococcus, Citrobacter and Klebsalia were also particularly abundant and are known to produce enzymes capable of digesting plastics, so synthetic plastics. So the bacteria won't be harmful to the insect or the environment when used at scale. So that's always good. So these are naturally occurring bacteria that just have the ability to break down a synthetic plastic. So that's always great. Now the abundance of bacteria indicates that they play a crucial role in breaking down the plastic. This may mean that mealworms may not actually have the ability to eat plastic. Instead, when they start eating the plastic, the bacteria in their guts might change to help break it down, just as I mentioned earlier. Thus the microbes in the mealworms, stomachs can adjust to unusual diets such as plastic. So the findings do support their hypothesis that the gut of certain insects can enable plastic degradation. This is likely because the bacteria in the gut can produce enzymes that break down the plastic polymers, which is always great to do. Now the next thing to do is they know that certain insect species like yellow mealworms and superworms have already demonstrated the ability to consume plastics. They're able to break down the materials like polystyrene with the help of bacteria in their gut. But the research is also unique because these mealworms are from Africa. Now Africa has a lot of problems with dealing with plastic waste in that they purchase and import a lot of products that have plastic waste. But they also don't necessarily have the infrastructure to deal with the recycling or even storage of that waste. So a lot of times it gets into the environment can harm not only habitats but the animals that live within that. So that is obviously a pretty difficult thing. So having a unique adaptation or unique mealworm that's specific to Africa to be able to look at these and develop these methods within Africa can really help African countries be able to like Kenya and others to be able to help focus and isolate these areas. Now the big thing is can they isolate the bacteria and the enzymes to work at scale. So you're obviously not going to just use mealworms, you're going to try and isolate and potentially make a product that would have the bacteria and those enzymes in it so that they can use it for processing plants and so forth. It's a pretty interesting study and it builds on other studies that have been done. I've seen this a lot and we just haven't seen, we haven't heard a lot about the development, that's why I want to talk about it today. Again, trying to stay on our good news week after last week's presidential election. So trying to see that there's hope that we can potentially and sometimes innovate our way out by using what is around us in the environment. Having and identifying animals and insects that are able to break down synthetic plastic is a huge, huge change in the way that we could manage the plastic in the future. I'm not saying that we have to make more or that we're able to make more, but if we can break this down biologically, that is a huge help. Instead of having to create other toxins from the recycling process of using chemical or physical recycling, like burning of this styrofoam, which we know is not good for the environment. So the more we can do biologically with a less impact on the environment, the better and I think it's really great. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'd like to hear your thoughts. You can go on our YouTube channel where this is. This episode is you can just leave a comment, you can leave a comment on Spotify. If you're watching the video or you're listening to this on your AirPods while commuting to work or while in your jog or walking your dog or whatever you're doing outside or inside, you know, whatever you're doing and you're listening to this from the audio perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can hit me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean. All one word. I would just love to hear your thoughts. And don't forget, I did put out a vlog earlier this week. So you can go check that on our YouTube channel and you just go to YouTube and just like up speak up for Blue TV. You can get to that channel and I'll link to it in the show notes. So thank you very much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Angelou. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)
