We have a big container here in the house for raising mealworms, but it starts getting decrepit after a few months. It’s more frass than food, the adult beetles start taking over, and while it’s still productive for now, the writing is on the wall — a few more months and I’ll be dumping it into the compost bin. If I were smart, I’d start a fresh mealworm colony now, before the old one fades away.
I am smart, S-M-R-T, so that’s what I did this morning. Here’s what a mealworm paradise looks like:
I poured in a mix of oats and cornmeal, with some barley for variety, and chopped up some old carrots for gnawing on. Then I transferred a bunch of larvae from the old colony, and also a few adults to start laying eggs. The cardboard and toilet paper rolls are for shelter, and they also lay eggs on those. Now I wait for the population to explode, and then I can start harvesting the worms for the more important spider colony.
Biology is so easy. Provide the right environment, and your subjects proliferate with little effort on your part.
I was reading Gerald Durrell in ‘The Stationary Ark’ and he gets passionate about the providing the right environment for animals in zoos; e.g. the absurd elephant house which was several times higher than needed or the birds’ enclosure which made it necessary to knock down the birds with jets of warm water whenever they needed to be treated for illness. Your beetles and mealworms seem less demanding than vertebrates.
You should try farming:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WuBDqcXVDeM
when you retire, will you be able to do research on campus as an emeritus?
if not, what will happen to your spiders?
Would the spiders accept screwworms? I heard they are getting abundant in Trumpland.
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There are birds that collect all kinds of bugs off cattle, not to mention maggots hatching in their droppings. If you have dairy farms nearby, maybe you could train birds to fill their gorge and return home to upchuck the harvest in return for tastier snacks.
Quoting a famous biology professor: Telling people to consume a less expensive version of what they want while even the cheap stuff is more expensive than it was last week does not address the problem.
Wow, PZ! Sounds like the meal worms are eating better than we will be able to soon.
Makin’ mealworms = is what mealworms do.
Mealworm porn.
Kinda niche kink (rule #34) but well, whatever feeds ya spiders..
@moxie #3: The tradition is to let them free so they can terrorize the villagers.
I put apple cores in with my mealworms. They seem to prefer apple way over carrots. Do carrots provide a more balanced diet? The apple cores do get moldy fairly quickly, so I change them often.