This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

A pound of chicken will set you back a couple bucks.

Ground beef, maybe three to four dollars a pound.

But a pound of protein-rich dried mealworms

could cost twice as much.

The price per pound of mealworm is still relatively expensive.

Juan A Morales Ramos is a research entomologist with the USDA in Stoneville, Mississippi, and he says that cost might be coming down.

For eight years, he and his team have selectively bred mealworms, which are the larvae of a type of darkling beetle.

Their goal was to breed larger and larger worms, and they succeeded in nearly doubling the size of the larvae.

But doubling up came with an evolutionary trade-off.

Larger larvae had fewer eggs and their offspring weren't as hardy as the ancestral strain.

Still, generations are shorter in the worm world, meaning it's faster to experiment,

and sequencing the genes of the selected strains might reveal new traits to breed for.

We may be able to produce a super line of mealworms that grow faster and larger and probably produce more eggs, hopefully.

The findings are in the Journal of Insect Science.

The eventual goal here is to bring mealworms beyond fishing bait, because if the

cost comes down, they'd be an economical protein source for farmed fish and chicken feeds,

and one recent study rated them as significantly

healthier than beef or chicken for a human diet. Other cultures are leading the

way. There are many cultures not just in Mexico but in Asia and Africa that regularly consume different types of insects.

You can go to the market and find them.

...