The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Interesting observation. "When she’s not working in her lab at Spain’s IBBTEC institute, Federica Bertocchini keeps bees. One day, when she looked at her hives, she found them infested with caterpillars called waxworms. These insects are the bane of beekeepers because they voraciously devour the wax that bees use to build their honeycombs. Bertocchini picked out the pests and put them in a plastic bag, while she cleaned out the hives. And when she returned to the bag, she found it full of holes.

The waxworms had eaten their way out.

Bertocchini doesn’t study insects, waxworms, or plastic—she focuses on the early development of animal embryos. But you can’t keep a good scientist away from an interesting question, and the perforated bags posed an obvious one: Were the waxworms actually digesting the plastic?
[...]
Why should waxworms have the ability to digest plastic so quickly? Bertocchini think it’s a coincidence. The carbon-carbon bonds that are found in polyethylene are also present in the wax that the caterpillars eat. By evolving to digest the latter, they may have inadvertently gained the ability to degrade the former.
[...]
Jennifer DeBruyn from the University of Tennessee, who is also looking for plastic-degrading microbes, is convinced that the waxworms really are digesting polyethylene, and wants to know whether it’s the insects themselves or the bacteria in their guts that are producing PE-busting enzymes. “If I had to guess, I would suspect the bacteria,” she says.

Either way, “the hunt for organisms that can degrade plastics is on,” she adds. “Currently, there are no alternatives—right now we don’t have a good solution for dealing with the plastics that are piling up on our planet.”"
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/the-very-hungry-plastic-eating-caterpillar/524097/

Comments

  1. Geo. TirebiterApril 24, 2017 at 10:43 PM

    maybe they can also eat the plastic people that populate the planet.

    ReplyDelete

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