Using male killing bacteria to markedly boost the efficiency of commercial insect cultures for processing food waste

There is rapidly growing interest in using insects to break down and utilize food waste that normally would have gone to landfill. In particular, the Black Soldier Fly (BSF), Hermetia illucens, has become a focus species as it has high nutritional values and constitutes a sustainable alternative as feed for livestock and as food for humans. From an environmental perspective, insects as an alternate protein source are promising because they exhibit high feed conversion efficiencies due to their ectotherm metabolism, where almost all energy from the feed goes into the production of biomass, and the emission of greenhouse gasses per kilo of mass gain in studied insect species is low compared to livestock. Insect rearing also requires much less land and water.

Here we propose to develop one tool which could instantaneously revolutionize commercial production of BSF. This involves the use of male killing bacteria to skew the sex ratio towards females which are the desirable sex in production. If successful, we will achieve an instant boost in the reproductive output of fly cultures and thereby dramatically increase the efficiency of protein harvested from the production.