These plastic chomping caterpillars can help fight pollution

The creature can gnaw on plastic, even polyethylene, a common, non-biodegradable plastic that currently clogs landfills and seas.

Now scientists have a much better understanding of how the worm is able to do this – and it comes down to its gut bacteria or its microbiome. The results, which were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Tuesday, could guide efforts to find an effective biodegradation system to combat plastic waste.

"We have found that waxworm caterpillars have gut microbes that are essential in the process of biodegradation of plastics," said Christopher LeMoine, associate professor and president of biology at Brandon University in Canada. .

"This process seems to depend on a synergy between the caterpillars and their intestinal bacteria to accelerate the degradation of polyethylene."

Many animals are thought to have a microbiome and it plays a key role in maintaining human health.

Not an immediate solution

In the wild, the larvae of the large wax moth are considered to be pests, since they act as a parasite in bee colonies, gnawing at the wax of the honeycomb.

His ability to eat plastic was accidentally discovered when an amateur beekeeper in Spain ripped out some pests from his hives and put them in a plastic bag. The worms finally ate small holes in the bag, chewing the plastic at an alarming rate.

Federica Bertocchini, the beekeeper, who also happened to be a scientist at the Cantabria Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, then developed a study to see how well the little larvae were able to break the plastic. The team discovered that the wax worms broke polyethylene plastic bags faster than other methods.

LeMoine said that the waxworms were not an immediate solution to plastic pollution, with even more work to do to understand how the caterpillars and microbes in their digestive tract work together before they can be adapted and reproduced in large scale.

One problem could be how to handle the toxic substance that the caterpillars excrete when fed plastic.

In addition, although they discovered that some gut bacteria could survive on the plastic for more than a year, the decomposition of the plastic took longer than when the larvae ate it, which which suggests that the caterpillar was instrumental in the process.

"Basically, the microbiome and the host work in synergy with each other for efficient plastic metabolism. Rather than a single species of bacteria, there are likely to be several species working together to facilitate this process", did he declare.

"Although there has been good progress in determining some of the key components, there are still some puzzles to be solved before this can be used effectively to solve our plastic problem, so it is probably best to continue to reduce plastic waste during all inclusive, "he added.

CNN's AJ Willingham contributed to this report.

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