I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I’ve been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the “worms”, and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The “worms” are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the “dirty jobs” at the farm. Well, everyone’s job there is dirty, but I’m one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It’s not as terrible as it might sound but it’s definitely not clean.
This is a throwaway account that I’ll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I’m not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I’ll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).
To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.
-WwF
Insofar as a bug’s preferences can be understood, are the bugs having a good time? Relative to living in the wild? Is there anything that could be done to improve the bugs’ living conditions? Improve bug conditions while still being a viable food source?
The bugs all have an r/k value that means that, like most else toward the bottom of the food chain, most of them in the wild are going to die before reaching adulthood, or even full size as larvae.
All of our crickets live pretty full lives. For the mealworms and wax worms, the ones we keep to breed have absolutely bangin’ lives: barely any predation or other threats, a nicely regulated environment, very good nutrition, and when they reach maturity they basically get to fuck and lay eggs all day until their bodies give out. The ones that get “harvested” get to reach full larval size in a low-stress environment. Idk what a bug wants but I can tell when nothing is going wrong.
So briefly, bugs’ conditions are far better than in the wild, almost as good as they could possibly be, as long as my coworkers and bosses don’t make mistakes…
Great! Thanks for answering.
It sounds like the mealworms and wax worms are having a better time than the crickets. Because I’m a giant baby, I’m much more enthusiastic about eating cricket meat than meal worms, so I’m curious about their situation. Is there something about cricket agriculture that should be improved?
(In case it’s not clear, all these questions are more about “what if we all eat bug meat” than about your specific workplace.)
I am not concerned about farmed insect welfare the way I am concerned about farmed vertebrate welfare. For one thing, it’s dubious as to whether insects have any feelings beyond “something is appealing” and “something is going wrong”. For another, mostly due to their size, it’s a lot easier to provide an insect with everything it needs to live well. Some larvae are well-accustomed to squirming all over each other while they eat plant matter and fatten up for metamorphosis. Keeping birds and mammals in enclosures 1.5 body lengths long, though, or in barns where they barely have enough room to stand, is fiendish.
Years ago I had my first taste of roasted spiced crickets and cricket cookies. We’d have to become an order of magnitude more efficient to be able to make them a major part of people’s diets, though. But I’m not saying it’s impossible.
Our crickets probably have the “better” lives actually. They don’t all get to make-a da baybee bugg, but they do get to reach adulthood before being either nommed by a herp or forgotten on a shelf or in a fridge, which is more than 98% of our meal and wax worms can say. An adult female darkling beetle (mealworm) can lay several hundred eggs. So we don’t need to route that much of our operation to replenishing our in-house populations.