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Are the Insects Fat?

The first research on fat insects came about in the early 1960s when an entomologist working in the US state of Florida began publishing research on obese mosquitoes. This researcher discovered that when he feeds flies caught from nature with his hand (“turning the hose into a micropipette”), the flies can convert half of their body into fat by dry weight.

More recently, scientists have studied obesity in male dragonflies. Ruud Schilder, a biologist at Penn State University, has shown that a particular parasite infection causes fat to accumulate in the chest area of ​​insects and around the muscles they use to fly. These fatty dragonflies had lower success in mating and defending their territory against rivals; maybe because they couldn’t fly for a long time. But on non-infected insects, some oil may help: One of Schilder’s colleagues found that chubby, healthy dragonflies have stronger flying muscles and breed more easily.

The most comprehensive study on insect obesity has been done on fruit flies. The larvae, which were fed with high-calorie foods, tended to get fat quickly. On the other hand, a diabetes-like condition developed in the larvae who were given foods containing high sugar and the life span of these flies was shortened. But when a fly reaches adulthood, it cannot grow beyond a certain limit. Just like a human, the fruit fly stores extra energy in the form of lipid droplets stored in cells. (Our lipid droplets are found in adipose tissue; the fruit fly has a similar organ called the “fat body”.) However, adult flies are sheathed by an exoskeleton made up of chitin as in other insects. According to Thomas J. Baranski, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, this means that their navels cannot expand. “Since it has such an exoskeleton, it stores the fat more tightly.”

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