Greater wax moth, or honeycomb moth, Galleria mellonella (Linnaeus, 1758) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) is recognized for many uses ranging from serving as a model organism for pathogenesis research (Mylonakis et al., 2005), to the purpose of the book of Van Huis and Tomberlin (2017), mass production for animal feed. In fact, G. mellonella can be used as feed for insectivorous species found in zoos (Finke, 2002). Greater wax moth can be grown on a variety of diets (Jindra and Sehnal, 1989), which indicates a tremendous potential for mass-production as reliance on a single feed stream is not a necessity.
References
- Finke, M.D., 2002. Complete nutrient composition of commercially raised invertebrates used as food for insectivores. Zoo Biology 21: 269-285.
- Jindra, M. and Sehnal, F., 1989. Larval growth, food consumption, and utilization of dietary protein and energy in Galleria mellonella. Journal of Insect Physiology 35: 719-724.
- Mylonakis, E., Moreno, R., El Khoury, J.B., Idnurm, A., Heitman, J., Calderwood, S.B., Ausubel, F.M. and Diener, A., 2005. Galleria mellonella as a model system to study Cryptococcus neoformans pathogenesis. Infection and Immunity 73: 3842-3850.
- Van Huis, A. and Tomberlin, J.K. (eds.), 2017. Insects as food and feed: from production to consumption. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, the Netherlands
Classification
Galleria mellonella
Kingdom | Animalia |
Phylum | Arthropoda |
Class | Insecta |
Order | Lepidoptera |
Family | Pyralidae |
Subfamily | Galleriinae |
Genus | Galleria |
Species | G. mellonella |
Author citation | (Linnaeus, 1758) |
Common names | |
greater wax moth, honeycomb moth |