Thanks for your great work! With respect to “Farmers reported that insects, especially crickets, will eat other insects if not provided an outside source of chitin.”, do producers use insect-derived chitin as a supplement? If so, do you have a published reference for this?
Do you know how small of a fraction of your presented figures are animals kept alive for breeding (e.g. adult flies or mealworm beetles)? Do you know anything about their lifespans/mortality/fate? Thanks!
On the chitin, I haven’t found anything cited that confirms this. A handful of farmers reported this to me, and industry guides often recommend mixing exoskeletons into foods, etc. I think a possibility is that crickets do this for nutrients besides chitin, but that is just the most well known part of exoskeletons, so people mention it.
On breeding: it’s going to vary depending on species and intention. If you’re growing your colony, you’ll need a larger breeding stock, but if you are keeping it the same size, you can use a smaller one. It’s not obvious to me how large they are on various farms, and I’m not certain how to approach estimating it. I think some farms likely just pull adults into breeding programs instead of slaughtering them (at least for crickets), while other farms keep separate breeding colonies (e.g. black soldier flies and mealworms are slaughtered as larvae, so some larvae need to be allowed to grow instead of being killed). My guess is that the lives of animals raised to breed would be better than those killed, but I wouldn’t put much stake in that. There are some good pictures of BSF breeding facilities and descriptions of the process in Bullock et al but I don’t think the source is authoritative.
Thanks for your great work! With respect to “Farmers reported that insects, especially crickets, will eat other insects if not provided an outside source of chitin.”, do producers use insect-derived chitin as a supplement? If so, do you have a published reference for this?
Do you know how small of a fraction of your presented figures are animals kept alive for breeding (e.g. adult flies or mealworm beetles)? Do you know anything about their lifespans/mortality/fate? Thanks!
Hi! Thanks for the questions.
On the chitin, I haven’t found anything cited that confirms this. A handful of farmers reported this to me, and industry guides often recommend mixing exoskeletons into foods, etc. I think a possibility is that crickets do this for nutrients besides chitin, but that is just the most well known part of exoskeletons, so people mention it.
On breeding: it’s going to vary depending on species and intention. If you’re growing your colony, you’ll need a larger breeding stock, but if you are keeping it the same size, you can use a smaller one. It’s not obvious to me how large they are on various farms, and I’m not certain how to approach estimating it. I think some farms likely just pull adults into breeding programs instead of slaughtering them (at least for crickets), while other farms keep separate breeding colonies (e.g. black soldier flies and mealworms are slaughtered as larvae, so some larvae need to be allowed to grow instead of being killed). My guess is that the lives of animals raised to breed would be better than those killed, but I wouldn’t put much stake in that. There are some good pictures of BSF breeding facilities and descriptions of the process in Bullock et al but I don’t think the source is authoritative.
Thanks!