These pesky caterpillars seem to digest plastic bags

[Cattledog]

The shopping bag is an infamous source of plastic pollution. The 2010 documentary “Bag It” estimated that Americans use 102 billion plastic bags per year. Bags are persistent. Plastic at the waste dump can last for an estimated 1,000 years. And they are pernicious. A wild baby manatee named Emoji died in a Florida zoo in February after filling its guts with plastic bags and other litter. To curb our reliance on cheap plastic, Washington began levying 5-cent bag fees in 2009. Several other municipalities have followed suit.

Of course, plastic bags are useful, too. Federica Bertocchini, a biologist at Spain's Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria and a hobbyist beekeeper, used such a bag to collect pests called wax worms. The caterpillars, the larvae of the moth Galleria mellonella, had infested her hives, chowing down on honey and wax.

She plucked the wax worms from the beehives and dropped the caterpillars into a plastic bag — only to find “the worms all around and the plastic bag full of holes,” as Bertocchini said in an email to The Washington Post. Bertocchini is an expert in embryonic development, not in caterpillars or things that chew through plastic. But the accidental discovery was too intriguing to pass up. The scientist contacted her colleagues at the University of Cambridge, Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe. “Once we saw the holes the reaction was immediate: that is it, we need to investigate this.”

As the three scientists reported Monday in the journal Current Biology, the wax worms aren't simply chewing the plastic into tiny bits. Instead, it appears that the animals — or something inside them — can digest polyethylene, a common plastic, producing ethylene glycol.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/24/these-pesky-caterpillars-seem-to-digest-plastic-bags/?utm_term=.f98ba7efcf66

[forgotmylogin]

1. I always try to re-use plastic grocery bags.

I hate throwing them away unless they are destroyed, and have thus amassed thousands of them wedged in a box near the trash can. I use them for kitty litter disposal among other things, and when they take over the kitchen I take a huge garbage-bag full to the grocery store and stuff them in their plastic grocery bag recycling bin. (I keep the garbage bag to use later.)

The plastic-eating caterpillars sound great though! They produce anti-freeze as a by product?

[applegrove]

2. Now if we could only get them to swim in salt water.

[cstanleytech]

3. Might not need to, odds are there are some things in the ocean that could probably do the job the

problem would be finding the right one that does not trigger something worse like say they found one that then released a poison into the water that killed fish as a byproduct? That would be one they would probably want to avoid working on.