Mesmerizing video shows maggot 'fountain' devour pizza in 2 hours, in the name of science
Knowing how larvae eat could help humans eliminate food waste, scientists say.
Humans produce 1.3 billion tons of food waste per year, and swarming hordes of at least one insect are happy to help take that off our hands: the black soldier fly.
Georgia Tech researchers dropped a cloud of the fly's larvae into an aquarium with food to see just how the maggots eat so deftly en masse: Larvae can chow down in five-minute bursts, the team noted, with the maggots known to outcompete other species for a piece of rotting fruit.
Using cameras with special tracking software, the seeming chaos of swarming larvae was seen as far more sophisticated: A mass of maggots flowing as "a fountain of larvae," researchers said.
Is it gross? Yes. But it's also grossly efficient, as the team detailed in new research.
As hungry grubs push to the bottom of a swarm for food — a whole pizza, perhaps — they displace the larvae who've already feasted themselves, lifting them up, over and back down again. Like how water moves in a fountain.
"This self-propagating flow pushes away potential roadblocks, thereby increasing eating rate," researchers say in an article published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The research includes a video of larvae devouring a 16-inch pizza in two hours. In strangely mesmerizing time-lapse footage, the swarm detaches the pizza's crust before slowly feeding toward the center.
While past studies had estimated larvae's feeding rate, researches noted, the mechanism by which groups of larvae feed was unclear.
Harnessing the feeding power of black soldier fly larvae "is one promising method" to deal with our food waste, the researches say. Thousands of maggots can be raised together in bins as larvae farmers — which are a thing — feed them food waste.
"At the end of their lives, the larvae are used as a sustainable feed source for chickens, fish and other livestock animals," the article says. "When farming larvae, maximizing eating rate is desired so that the larvae can grow as quickly as possible."
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