Agricultural education students at North Judson-San Pierre will be able to continue their study of mealworms, thanks to a $700 grant from the Northern Indiana Community Foundation. Teacher Emily DuVall says the project started with last year’s Natural Resources class and their weekly current events discussions.
“We read an article on how mealworms are now being used to eat Styrofoam and help combat a problem in our landfills, and so my students in the class said ‘we should do it’ and we did it,” DuVall told the school board last week.
She says the experiment started small, with 300 mealworms and two tanks borrowed from the science department. One tank had a grain-fed control group, and the other had Styrofoam, with sustenance provided by students.
This year’s class is conducting two experiments. DuVall says one is determining whether the adult darkling beetles can also eat Styrofoam. The second experiment is looking at the benefits of their waste as fertilizer. DuVall says the grant will allow the purchase of extra mealworms.
“We are going to be doing time-lapse photography on mealworms to learn more about their life cycle. We’ve already noticed the orb of Styrofoam actually stay in life stages longer than the ones on the wheat bran. So we’re just now starting to do time-lapse photography on that. We’re going to order more mealworms, and some of the grant will also allow us to go to a science fair in Indianapolis over Spring break.”
The N.J.-S.P. School Board last week formally approved the grant, which is their policy for any monetary donation to the school.
