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Mealworms Make a Meal of Styrofoam
A new study from Stanford University has shown that common mealworms can survive on a diet of Styrofoam and other types of polystyrene, potentially leading to new solutions to address the global plastic pollution problem.
The study says that the tiny worm has microorganisms in its guts that can process plastic. The researchers made this “surprising” discovery after observing 100 mealworms in a laboratory, which ate between 34 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam per day.
Within 24 hours, the worms converted about half of the Styrofoam into carbon dioxide while excreting the bulk of the remaining plastic as biodegraded fragments.
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