The Very Hungry Plastic-Eating Caterpillar
Could waxworms—or something inside them—help degrade the planet’s mountains of plastic waste?
by Ed Yong
Apr 24, 2017
3 minutes
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
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