Experiment with Suspected GM Soy and Tenebrio Molitor: Day 5

It's been five days, so it's time to clean the containers and take a mealworm count. Mealworms can be killed by mold, so I want to make sure that the pieces of carrot, mango peel, and banana peel and moistened soy meal that I have given as food and drink do not spoil.

When transferring the mealworms and waste and leftover food, I learned that the moistened soy meal hardened as it dried. From now on I will not moisten the soy meal, as it will be the mainstay of the mealworms diet, supplemented by a slice of carrot.

Here is a picture of the mealworms from the container being fed organic soy meal after the cleaning.

Cleaning was a simple matter of shaking each container in turn, into a bowl, picking out the mealworms and putting them in another bowl, wiping the container, adding fresh food, and then returning each group of mealworms to the container they came from (labelled either "?GM" or unlabelled).

While I did the cleaning, aided by my son, I supervised a count of the worms in each container. So far, the container of mealworms being fed suspected GM soy still numbers 59 worms, while the container being fed organic soy meal numbers only 58 mealworms, so one of the organic soy meal eaters has died. Of course, with mealworms one expects the occasional random death, but I admit this is not the result I expected.

A few days from now, I plan to switch the suspected GM soy from the bulk soy I bought at Superstore with the soy beans from the Asian store which I also suspect may be GM. After five more days, it may be fair to say that the "suspected" soy is no longer suspect, since it becomes increasingly unlikely that it contains any Bt toxin that would be fatal to mealworms. Now that the last of the remaining bran has been removed (food that came with the mealworms from the pet store), the mealworms in each container will have to rely on the soy meal (suspected GM vs. organic) as the staple for their diet.

Let's see what happens.