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Europes biggest insect factory goes bankrupt — these bugs are not even Dog Food

By Jo Nova

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming

By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the […]

January 2nd, 2026 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

First invertebrate astronomers found? Australian Bogong moths use stars to navigate 1,000 kilometer trip

Bogong moths resting in caves in the Snowy Mountains. Photo by Eric Warrant. The Conversation.

By Jo Nova

First insects to use the stars to navigate?

Flight paths of Bobong moths. | The Conversation.

Each year thousands of Bogong moths hatch all over Eastern Australia. Somehow they fly 1,000 kilometers to caves in the Snowy Mountains that they have never seen. Once inside, they hang around and do an insect form of hibernation in the cool Alpine caves through the heat of summer. When autumn comes, they fly 1,000 kilometers back to where they came from so they can breed, and keel over. Next year their children make the exact same trip.

Researchers managed to catch some moths and put them in flight simulators (for real) where Earths magnetic field was neutralized, so they could figure out if the moths could navigate without it. Somehow they “tethered” the moths, and showed them night sky and lo’, behold, the moths still tried to fly in the right direction. When the sky was flipped, the moths reversed course, and when the stars were randomized, the moths were confused.

Ponder that the stars revolve through the night, […]

June 20th, 2025 | Tags: , , , | Category: Astronomy, Biology, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Memo to Minions: You will be allowed to eat crickets to save the climate says EU

By Jo Nova

The headline is a PsyOp all on its own. You didn’t know you were not allowed to eat crickets and powdered mealworm larvae before. Rejoice in a freedom won:

Europeans now also allowed to eat cricket powder and small mealworms

Retail Detail

The European Commission declares new insect products safe for consumption. So from Tuesday, powdered house crickets and the small mealworm will also be allowed in food.

Back in February last year, the European Union announced that three species of insects would henceforth be allowed for human consumption: the migratory spider cricket, the yellow mealworm and the house cricket. Now the European Commission is adding several more insect products to the authorised list…

Insects, they tell us, are “highly nutritious” in a vague non-specific way that does not list a single nutrient which we can’t get enough of at the moment. Instead the main, “unique” selling point is that if we eat crickets we might slow storms eighty years from now:

Insects are also seen as part of the transition to a more environmentally friendly and plant-based food system. The creatures emit less greenhouse gases, have a lot […]

January 27th, 2023 | Tags: , | Category: Europe, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |