One swol mealworm amidst its weaker brethren. (Credit: The Thought Emporium, YouTube)

Have you ever found yourself looking at the insects of the Paleozoic era, including the dragonfly Meganeuropsis permiana with its 71 cm wingspan and wondered what it would be like to have one as a pet? If so, you’re in luck because the mad lads over at [The Thought Emporium] have done a lot of the legwork already to grow your own raven-sized moths and more. As it turns out, all it takes is hijacking the chemical signals that control the development phases, to grow positively humongous mealworms and friends.

The growth process of the juveniles, such as mealworms – the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle – goes through a number of molting stages (instars), with the insect juvenile hormone levels staying high until it is time for the final molt and transformation into a pupa from which the adult form emerges. The pyriproxyfen insecticide is a juvenile hormone analog that prevents this event. Although at high doses larvae perish, the video demonstrates that lower doses work to merely inhibit the final molt.

Hormone levels in an insect across its larval and pupa stages.

That proof-of-concept is nice of course if you really want to grow larger grubs, but doesn’t ultimately really affect the final form as they simply go through the same number of instars. Changing this requires another hormone/insecticide, called ecdysone, which regulates the number of instars before the final molt and pupal stage.

Amusingly, this hormone is expressed by plants to mess with larvae as they predate on their tissues, with spinach expressing a very significant amount of this phyto-ecdysone. For humans this incidentally interacts with the estrogen receptor beta, which helps with building muscle. Ergo bodybuilding supplies provide a ready to use source of this hormone as ‘beta ecdysterone’ to make swol insects with.

Unfortunately, this hormone turned out to be very tricky to apply, as adding it to their feed like with pyriproxyfen merely resulted in the test subjects losing weight or outright dying. For the next step it would seem that a more controlled exposure method is needed, which may or may not involve some DNA editing. Clearly creating Mothra is a lot harder than just blasting a hapless insect with some random ionizing radiation or toxic chemicals.

Hackaday

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