“If they just want to escape, they are going to get fed up very soon. “We want to know if they’re munching the plastic to use as a food, or just because they want to escape,” Bombelli tells Sample. But that means learning more about the worm’s motivation. Bombelli also suggests it may be possible to breed and release an army of wax worms. coli bacteria or plankton that would attack plastic in the wild, writes Sample. The enzyme could be produced by modified E. But just how that will work is speculative. The hope is that the discovery could lead to a method for breaking down polyethylene that is currently filling in landfills and clogging waterways. The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible.” “The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut. We showed that the polymer chains in polyethylene plastic are actually broken by the wax worms,” co-author Paolo Bombelli says in a press release. “The caterpillars are not just eating the plastic without modifying its chemical make-up.
So they smooshed up some of the worms and applied the paste to the plastic, which also caused holes to appear. Within 12 hours, they had eaten about 92 milligrams of plastic, which Bertocchini says is pretty fast, especially compared to bacteria discovered last year which dissolves polyethylene at a rate of about 0.13 milligrams per day.Īs Ian Sample at The Guardian reports, the researchers wanted to make sure the worms weren’t just chewing the plastic into microscopic particles.
Within 40 minutes, holes began to appear. In order to study the worms’ munching ability, the researchers put 100 wax worms in a plastic shopping bag from a U.K. This project began there and then," she says in a press release.īertocchini and colleagues from Cambridge University began studying the creatures and found that the common wax worm can not only munch but also metabolize polyethylene, the plastic in shopping bags which makes up about 40 percent of the plastics used in Europe. They published their results this week in the journal Current Biology. There was only one explanation: The worms had made the holes and had escaped. "When I checked, I saw that the bag was full of holes. When she returned, the worms were all over the place. But researchers have found another use as plastic recyclers.įederica Bertocchini, an amateur beekeeper and scientist at the Spanish National Research Council, picked some wax worms out of one of her beehives and put them in a plastic shopping bag. But in Europe, the worms are considered a beehive pest where they chew through the beeswax, disrupting the hive. Wax worms, which are the larval stage of the wax moth Galleria mellonella, are commonly used in the United States as fishing bait or birdfeeder snacks.
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