The partnership between the Environmental Engineering Group at SLU and Dr. Ivã Guidini Lopes from the Aquaculture Center of Unesp (São Paulo, Brazil) resulted in a second publication, entitled “Reduction of bacteria in relation to feeding regimes when treating aquaculture waste in fly larvae composting”, recently published in Frontiers in Microbiology, as part of the research topic “Microbial dynamics during industrial rearing and processing of insects”.
In this study, contaminated aquaculture waste (fish carcasses) with Salmonella spp., E. coli and Enterococcus spp. were used as growth substrate for black soldier fly larvae (BSFL, Hermetia illucens). The results revealed that BSFL inactivates both Salmonella spp. and E. coli to some extent, but the feeding regime (i.e. the supply of substrate once or at different feeding events) was found to influence this inactivation capacity of the larvae. When contaminated substrate was supplied three times, bacteria were less inactivated in comparison to a single supply of this contaminated material at the beginning of the trial. These results indicate that further processing should be performed with both BSFL biomass and the residual material at the end of the treatments, in order to guarantee complete hygienization.
Full paper available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01616/full