Week 9: Additional and interesting information about darkling beetles

As discussed in previous posts, the meal-worms will grow into darkling beetles. Some of the meal-worms bred in this project had grown into darkling beetles. Below shows the update of the current progress of the meal-worms.

Picture 1

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Darkling beetles are approximately 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) in length. They have chewing mouthparts and one pair of antennae. The antennae are often segmented into 11 parts and are thread-like, bead-like or slightly cubed. The darkling beetle does not have any major distinguishing characteristics. There are no bumps or outgrowths, as they are uniformly smooth and black; one end is easy to tell from the other. Wings of the darkling beetle are fused, rendering this beetle flightless. All these characteristics can be seen in Picture 1 above.

HOW DARKLING BEETLES DEFEND THEMSELVES?

Darkling beetles have a very interesting defense mechanism. If they were disturbed, they assume a head down and tail up position, and if handled roughly, they emit a dark-colored, foul-smelling fluid. This behavior is enough to discourage all but the most determined predators. The fluid washes off easily with water in case of contact with your hands. Coyotes, foxes, hawks, snakes, ravens, and crows often eat darkling beetles. The larger species have no other insect predator as adults.

This dark-colored, foul-smelling fluid seems to be a potential subject which can be investigated further to see if there's any area which the defensive mechanism can be applied on or being mimicked. The compositions of the fluid is not known at the moment, but the defense mechanism is surely quite interesting for a small insect like the darkling beetles, which is good enough to fend off most, but not all of its predators.

Sources:

[1] Woodland Park Zoo (2014). Darkling Beetle. Retrieved from

http://www.zoo.org/page.aspx?pid=1915#.U5VvOfmSySo

[2] Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (2014). What About Dakling Beetles? Retrieved from

http://science-ed.pnnl.gov/pals/resource/cards/darklingbeetles.stm

Week 8: What Can We Inspired from Breadworm?

Breadworm always shed its skin due to the high content of protein in the body. What can the engineer inspired from breadworm is to invent a type of protective coating on either automobile and household. 

What is the function of Coating?

A paint or coating is defined as liquid, liquefiable or mastic composition designed for application to a substrate as a think layer which is converted to an adherent film after application. Paints and coatings are used to protect, decorate or add functionality to an object or surface.

Acymax Technologies

What can be mimicked?

Engineer can mimic the ability of shedding skin by the breadworm on inventing a type of protective coating. This protective coating can be applied and reused easily. The materials used has to be bio-degradable.Furthermore, it can be engineered to provide functional properties needed to provide solution for a wide range of demanding application. For an example, most of the car owner will have to repaint the car after 5 years or have their car polished once in awhile in order to maintain the "shiny" look of their car. By inventing this protective layer, all the car owner has to do is to spray a layer of coating on their car with no maintenance require. After some period of time, scratches or any defect formed on the layer of coating due to the weather or other causes, the owner just have to remove the protective coating by peeling and re-apply a new layer on the car. The car will look brand new again. This protective coating will have the same abilities as mobile phone's screen protector. 

Week 7: Reverse Bio-Engineering Worksheet
1. Examine the biological artifact with the intent of discerning:
   a. What does the biological artifact do?
       It sheds it's skin
   b. How does the biological artifact work?
       The continuous increasing of body size requires the worm to shed it's skin
   c. What might the biological artifact's "requirements" have been?
      (i) high protein concentration
      (ii) continuous increasing of body mass
2. Relate the biological artifact's features to the artifact requirements listed in 1.c.:
   a. List the biological artifacts features (geometry, materials, mechanisms, etc)
     (i) bio-degradeable
     (ii) easily replaceable/ reconstructed
   b. How does the biological artifact's features support the requirements?
      By changing its skin, it allows the worm to grow continuously, it does not provide any defensive or offensive requirements. But it allows the worm to travel further because the movements are not restricted by the tight skins

3. How do the form and material of a feature relate to the function that the feature performs?
     From shedding skin, the form of the skin depends on the shape of the worm. The regenerated skin would be different each time regenerated as the size of the worm keeps increasing. The function of the skin is to protect the worm and also provide an exoskeleton to the worm. Whereas, the material of the skin would be a lot of protein.

4. Suggest a new product or process based upon what you've learned in 1-3 above.
    A new product that could use to protect a vehicle from scratches could be done. It would be easily detachable and also easily replaceable. This could reduce the number of scratches on the car.

Week 6: Mealworms vs Superworms

When you go to fish shop, did you notice there is actually 2 kind of worms they breed to feed the fish? One of it is named mealworms and another one is named superworms. The picture below will shows the size difference between them.

Mealworm (bottom) and Superworm (top)

To clarify between this 2 worms, major differences is stated below.

Scientific Classification:

• Superworms (Zophobas morio) is a darkling beetle and the larvae are known as superworms
• Mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) is also a darkling beetle and the larvae are known as mealworms

Size difference: 

• Superworms - 6.3 cm in length
• Mealworms - 1.25 to 1.8 cm in length

Nutritional Value: 

• Superworms - Approximate: Protein 19.06%, Fat 14.19%, Calcium 173ppm, Fiber 2.60%, Moisture 61.92%, overall chitin ratio is low
• Mealworms - lack essential nutrition, the calcium: phosphorus ratio is not ideal and the exoskeleton is hard and high in chitin

Gut Loading:

All feeders need to be gut loaded before offering to your reptile. Both larvae live right in a container of their food source: bran, cornmeal, rolled oats, breakfast flakes, or chick starter mash. 

• Superworms are voracious eaters and will devour what ever you give them to eat. They are mostly active at night so throw in veggies, fruit, or even bones with marrow
• Mealworms are very inactive in comparison to supers and it is hard to gut load them. The problem is the more you feed them the faster they will pupate

Life Expectancy: 

• Superworms can stay in the larvae stage for up to a year, they only turn into pupae if separated from all other larvae. 
• Stage Time (affected by temperature, humidity and food)
• Egg 4-19 days 
• Larva 10 weeks. Visible in 7-10 days
• Pupae 6-18 days
• Beetle live from 3 to 15 years
• Number of eggs produced 100 to 500
• Mealworms will pupate within 12 to 50 days if not refrigerated, they do not have to be separated from the other larvae.
• Stage Time (affected by temperature, humidity and food)
• Egg 10 to 12 days
• Larva 12 to 54 days
• Pupae 20 days
• Beetle 60 to 90 days
• Number of eggs produced 80 to 100

We shared on how to breed mealworms on previous post. Maybe you will interested on how to breed superworms as well.

Breeding Superworms: 

• Superworm beetles: 
• The beetles must be kept on the same food source as the larvae and fed daily otherwise they will eat the eggs. In addition feed them fruit, veggies and greens - no potatoes! A female lay between 100 and 500 eggs in her lifetime. Put egg containers inside the tub to give the beetles hiding areas and to make transferring to a different tub easy, transferring needs to be done every 2 to 3 weeks to give the eggs time to hatch. You should see the larvae within 7 to 10 days. 
• Superworm larvae: 
• After 5 months the larvae are big enough to be separated and placed in containers similar to this:
• Do not provide any food or water because this will prolong the process. The larvae will curl up and go through a metamorphoses. 
• Superworm pupae: 
• Metamorphoses will last between 6 and 18 days before the beetle will emerge.

Google search keywords: comparison of mealworms and superworms

Week 5: Biological classification of mealworm beetle

Biological classification is a method of scientific taxonomy used to group and categorize organisms into groups such asgenus or species. These groups are known as taxa.

Bionomial name : Tenebrio Molitor ( Linnaeus, 1758 )

The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks.

The mealworm beetle scientific classification is the following:

                                                                     Meaning:

Kingdom:   Animalia                  are multicellular eukaryotes

Phylum:     Arthropoda              have jointed limbs and exoskeletons

Class:        Insecta                  3 body segments, 3 pair of jointed legs

Order:        Coleoptera               bettles (sheated wing)

Family:      Tenebrionidae         darkling beetles    

Genus:       Tenebrio                   means "lover of darkness"

Species:     Tenebrio molitor       hardly, with difficulty   

Reference:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mealworm

(2) http://isite.lps.org/tmullen/web/documents/MealwormVsSuperworm.pdf

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_classification

(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tenebrio_molitor_MHNT.jpg

Week 4: The breeding method of mealworms

1. So firstly, our group bought a plastic container with small openings at the top to ensure there’s air flowing into the container. The container was not that big, just big enough to keep all the worms inside and preventing them from escaping.

2. The container was then filled with sand to provide an environment similar to the natural habitat of meal worms. The amount of sand was filled just enough to provide a thin layer for the meal worms to move about.

3. After all these were done, we then placed our meal worms inside the plastic container provided. An amount of about roughly 50 meal worms was breed in the container.

4. Every day, we will feed the meal worms with moist bread. The moist bread would serve as a source of food and water, since we cannot put a bowl of water in as the worms will drown when they crawl in for water consumption.

5. We also included some newspaper to provide some shade for the meal worms. Surprisingly, the meal worms ate up some of the newspaper as holes were being observed on the newspapers.

6. The temperature of the surroundings was at room temperature, about 25°C. The humidity was about 70-90% [1], the humidity in Malaysia. The humidity affects the rate of reproduction of the full grown beetles. The higher the humidity, the quicker the rate of reproduction [2].

7. Finally, the condition inside the container was maintained by removing any dead meal worms. So far, from the start of the project till the current time, there wasn't any dead meal worm found yet.

The current status of our meal worms can be seen in Figure 1 below, and we will continue to observe the lives of meal worms and we hope to obtain some inspiration from them.

Figure 1: The current conditions of the meal worms bred.

The video below shows how to breed meal worms in few simple steps. Feel free to watch it and to get a clearer and better understanding in breeding meal worms.

A guide to raising and breeding meal worms

[1] McGinley, M. (2011). Climate of Malaysia. Retrieved from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/151260

[2] Mealwormcare.org. (2014). Raising and breeding. Retrieved from http://mealwormcare.org/breeding/

Week 3:The lifecycle of the darkling beetle is simple and fascinating

Meal worms at maturity. These are probably 12 to 18 weeks old after hatch, under good conditions.

After meal worms are mature (12 to 18 weeks old, depending on how warm, humid and well fed they are) they will pupate.

About 1 to 2 weeks after pupating they morph into beetles. The darkling beetles may start out very pale, like almost white but steadily get darker within a week or so.

Beetles will mate and start laying eggs within a day or so after morphing.

The eggs are microscopic. The egg is much smaller than that. However, in 6 weeks this will be a meal worm that you still may not see except for the substrate they are moving around.

The life cycle is pretty interesting. Beetles lay very tiny eggs, those eggs hatch in less than 2 weeks under perfect conditions, those grow up to be meal worms but may take as long as 10 to 16 weeks and then they pupate. The pupae may seem dried up and dead but in a very short time (one to 2 weeks) they hatch and emerge as a beetle and it starts all over again. 

Source: Meal Worm