Aquaculture, the world's fastest-growing food-production sector, is on the verge of extinction. Our desire for seafood grows, yet with over 90% of wild fish stocks completely fished, overexploited, feeding wildlife to cattle is an unsustainable economic model. The FAO predicts a drop in supply of 3 million tonnes by 2025, due to a four-fold increase in fishmeal prices over the last 15 years.
The aquaculture business must feed billions of farmed fish every day. Insects at all life stages are rich sources of protein, fat, and many other important nutrients, and can be eaten by humans or used as feed for human food animals like fish, poultry, and pigs. Much of this attention centres on their sustainability relative to vertebrate meat: they require orders of magnitude less feed, water, and land than mammals or birds per gram of protein and produce similarly less waste. Insect meals are less environmentally destructive and often cheaper than other ingredients of animal feed, namely soy and fish meal.
BSFL are also edible, especially since they do not bioaccumulate toxins or drugs, and thus can be fed to other animals whole or as a ground-up product, black soldier fly meal (BSFM). BSFM is nutritionally comparable to fishmeal or soymeal, and experiments using BSFM as a whole or partial replacement to these meals in aquaculture and poultry farming show no significant effects on the health or development of the livestock or on the quality and flavour of the meat or eggs. Since waste from fish or poultry production, such as manure and offal, can be used to feed the same BSFL that are fed to these animals, BSF bioconversion creates a highly desirable closed-nutrient loop. BSF produce little waste themselves other than some frass and shed exoskeletons, which, along with any waste they do not consume, can be valorised as a ready-to-use fertilizer product.
Insects can be used as a protein-rich supplement in poultry diets. The black soldier fly (BSF), Hermetia illucens, is one of the most promising insect species for commercial production because of its high protein and fat content. Black soldier Fly larva (BSFL) meal added to the diets of broiler chicks as a potential feed ingredient can stimulate nonspecific immune responses in broiler chicks and increase their survivability.
Insect producers have found a mainstream market in pet food. Due to their great digestibility and palatability, insect products are well-suited to the needs of pet food. For a variety of reasons, insects are a popular alternative for animal nutrition. On the one hand, insects are a natural element of many animals' diets, including pets. In fact, insects make up between 3% and 5% of a wild cat's diet. Several pet food businesses have already begun to include insects in their feed formulas, primarily as a way to broaden their product variety, such as in hypoallergenic goods.
Because black soldier fly larvae are voracious feeders, they're a good candidate for pig feed because they grow so quickly. It is a promising, high-energy feed ingredient that can be successfully fed to nursery pigs, while improving their growth performance.
