Anti-microbial and digestibility trials of black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) in rats, rabbits, and reptiles as a model for humans – a review

Abstract

For the past few decades, attentiveness has been progressive in the arcade of insect production for human food and animal feeds. The husbandry of edible insects has arisen as an auspicious unconventional approach for making protein-enriched feed ingredients. The industrialisation of insect-based protein is going to be more lucrative, dynamic, and well-organised in the future for livestock agribusiness and aquaculture, and consequently, it lowers environmental hazards by decreasing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Black soldier flies (BSF) are commercially utilised for the biodegradation of biological wastes at a large scale. BSF larvae’s propensity to ingest rotten vegetables, fruits, livestock faeces, and cadavers has empowered their advancement in waste removal services. Although these bio-wastes contain efficient nutrients, there are also colonies of many microbes in these biological trashes. The larvae of Hermetia illucens produce a large number of antimicrobial peptides to protect themselves against microbial invasion. The immune system of these insects is being potentiated by the genome of their innate gut microbes that helps to avoid the settlement of pathogens to which larvae are vulnerable from the feeding substrates. Insects have a strong innate defence system that figures out the production of a wide-ranging variety of antimicrobial peptides. The usage of antibiotics in livestock husbandry has been documented as the leading problem for antibiotic resistance against many pathogens in animals and humans consuming adulterated food products with antibiotic residues. Until this time many types of research have been done about the use of BSF insects in poultry and aquaculture but very few studies have been done on lab animals like rats, rabbits, and reptiles.