Which insects are food for astronauts?

If you’ve ever felt silk, you know that it’s a lovely, light, soft fabric. But did you know that silk actually comes from a caterpillar?

Silkworm moths are a bit like cows – they don’t exist in the wild, and can’t survive there because they can’t fly or eat. Instead, they are farmed by humans for their silk.

Like all moths and butterflies, silkworm moths have four stages of life: egg, larvae, pupa, and adult. The larvae is the caterpillar stage, during which the silkworm caterpillar does nothing but munch on mulberry trees. Then, in order to change into an adult, the moth must spin its cocoon.

A silkworm’s Cocoon is one long strand of silk. There’s so much silk in it that if you unravelled them, it would only take 10 Cocoon to make a strand of silk that would reach to the top of Mount Everest! There is one problem, however: when a moth hatches, it destroys the Cocoon to escape and makes the silk useless.

To stop that from happening, the coccons are boiled before the moth hatches, which dissolves the glue holding the strands together so that they can be collected to turn into silk. But the boiled pupae don’t go to waste: they’re actually a great source of protein. They’re so nutritious and easy to raise that they may be the perfect source of animal protein for astronauts on long space missions. Even the silk from the coccons could be made into jam for the astronauts!