Researchers discovered that one species of caterpillar has the ability to digest one of the toughest plastics to break down. This caterpillar is the Wax Moth.
The Wax Moth caterpillar lives in beehives and feeds on honey and wax. The caterpillar’s ability to break down plastic was discovered by Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Federica Bertocchini at the University of Cantabria in Spain. This was discovered when the researchers began to notice holes appearing in the bags containing the aforementioned caterpillars. Under further investigation, they found that the caterpillars could degrade 92 milligrams of the plastic in around 12 hours. The caterpillar’s ability to digest polypropylene would be beneficial to us as polypropylene is the main type of plastic found in waste. It takes 20 to 30 years for polypropylene to decompose, and even the smallest piece of plastic could cause havoc on an environment. Statistics have shown that over 1 million animals die each year due to plastic debris in the ocean. Could The Wax Moth caterpillar be the solution? Researchers have found that you would need billions of caterpillars eating constantly all year-round to deal with this problem. These caterpillars could also have a massive negative impact on bee colonies as the mass breeding of the honey eating insects could devastate bee habitats.
Read more about this fascinating discovery here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/plastic-eating-bugs-wax-moth-caterpillars-bee
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