Six-legged Livestock: Rearing Black Soldier Fly on biowaste

The FWF - Top Citizen Science project Six-legged Livestock: Rearing Black Soldier Fly on biowaste has the objective to complement the already existing FWF project From Waste to Feed: Waste products as a source of protein-rich feedstuff. The purpose of the currently running FWF project is to evaluate and optimize the production of an animal feedstuff in form of Hermetia illucens prepupae fed on a variety of organic waste sources. So far, single and defined diets were tested in laboratory experiments, never mixed diets, such as domestic biowaste. The composition of such source-separate collected biowaste is hard to define, because it strongly depends on the eating habit of the consumers, season and region. To counteract this deficiency, experiments have to be conducted in a high number and with a broad spectrum of different diets and associated biowastes. This perfectly justifies a project based on citizen participation. Citizens who do not usually work in science will, supported by researchers and experts, conduct feeding experiments with Black Soldier Fly larvae at their homes. They will use their daily incurring domestic biowaste using feeding container boxes they are building from scratch. By getting in touch with edible insects, participants will lose their prejudice against insect- based feed which will increase public acceptance of insect based fish- and chicken feed and nutrition. Furthermore, this citizen science project will dismantle existing barriers between science and society, by connecting both in an alliance that forms greater knowledge than science could obtain alone.

Six-legged Livestock: Rearing Black Soldier Fly on biowaste With our Citizen Science project, we had the goal to introduce people to a future vision where insects will be used to tackle significant socio-ecological problems. In our hands-on workshops we were able directly involve 150 citizen scientists and had them take responsibility of their personal three- week long experiments on larvae of the Black Soldier Fly. In total, 40 rearing containers were built and housed more than 10,000 Larvae until the termination of the experiments. The results produced by the citizen scientists home experiments contribute not only to the improvement of small-scale rearing, but also provide additional valuable insights in the versality of this waste-consuming insect. Samples from these experiments were stored after each concluded workshop and will be analysed in more detail within an follow-up project funded by the Tiroler Wissenschaftsförderung. Additionally, bringing our project also to schools inspired teachers to incorporate the workshops in their syllabus as a novel way to teach interdisciplinary issues in a practice-oriented way also in the future. All necessary instructions will be made available on our website (www.fromwastetofeed.wordpress.com). Besides workshop participants, many more people were reached at our booths at public events such as Fest der Wissenschaft or Campus-Tage Technik and during presentations on our project progress at various national and international scientific meetings. More general information was spread through newspaper articles while resources to reproduce our workshops will be made available for free in upcoming scholarly publications. The project also benefitted future scientists, enabling two bachelor and one diploma student to successfully complete their studies.