Invertebrate Welfare — February 2021
Today marks one year since I sent the first edition of this newsletter to 39 people. Thanks for reading along! Here’s the latest on invertebrate welfare.
Investment in insect farming
Over the last month, using Crunchbase and news reports, I identified 98 funding rounds in private insect farming companies since 2012, totaling over $950MM USD. I’ve used these to try to see trends in how the industry is growing in response to investments.
Summary statistics of the data are available here (access to data available on request).
Black soldier flies and mealworms dominate, crickets barely make the map.
The vast majority of investments into insect farming over the last 8 years have gone to black soldier fly and mealworm producers.
Of known investments, 52.3% have been in black soldier fly production, 45.1% have been in mealworm production, and just 1.3% have been in cricket production.
Mealworm funding is dominated by a single company, Ynsect. Removing Ynsect from the analysis, mealworm funding drops to 5.7%, and black soldier fly funding jumps to 90%.
Of the top 20 producers by total funding, 14 produce black soldier flies, 2 produce mealworms, 2 produce crickets, 1 produces grasshoppers, and 1 is unknown (and already defunct).
This suggests that from the perspective of investors, the future of the industry is in black soldier flies and possibly mealworms.
Investors aren’t diversifying.
Looking at individual investors, few are investing in multiple producers, and instead are making single bets on single companies. The major exception to this is the European Commission, which has made grants to at least 5 different insect producers. I am uncertain how normal this is for venture capital.
Investors are primarily impact investors, governments, and community groups.
Investment is focused on Europe.
Investment in insect farming is dominated by just a few major companies, in order by size: Ynsect (France), InnovaFeed (France), AgriProtein (South Africa), Protix (Netherlands), and BetaHatch (US).
Due to the size of investments in these companies, the majority of insect farming investment has been in Europe, followed by South Africa and the US.
Other insect farming news
Rabobank, a Dutch bank that is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, released a report that apparently suggests that production of insect protein for animal feed and pet food could reach 500,000 tonnes by 2030, up from 10,000 tonnes today (for those specific industries).
I haven’t been able to get access to the report, so these comments are based on media coverage.
Notably, Rabobank has invested heavily in Protix, a Dutch black soldier fly producer.
Total investment from Rabobank wasn’t disclosed, but they’ve been involved in funding rounds worth at least $69MM USD.
It’s hard to say how this should impact analysis of the report. Rabobank could be bullish on insect farming because they’ve invested heavily in it, or could have invested heavily in insect farming because they’re bullish on it.
Given that black soldier flies cost 3x to 5x as much as a comparable fishmeal product, if this forecast is accurate, it seems likely that the industry might still be propped up on venture capital by 2030. The report specifies that the analysts don’t expect prices to drop significantly during this scaling up period, but expects that they will drop to a price competitive with fishmeal in the decades following this growth.
Apparently, the report argues that insectmeal won’t be widely adopted as a primary food source, but as a secondary diet additive alongside fishmeal and grain feed products.
Thai Union Group, a major Thai shrimp and fish producer, is testing several insect proteins as shrimp food for their fisheries.
The company has also invested an undisclosed amount in Flying SpArk, an Israeli company that produces fruit fly larvae for human food and animal feed. Flying SpArk is currently preparing to become publicly traded.
The world’s largest shrimp producer, Thai company Charoen Pokphand Foods, has funded a research project to commercialize black soldier fly larvae for animal feed and human food.
InsectFeed, a new project at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, is now researching the ethics of insect farming, including questions on insects’ capacity for pain, and how to weigh the welfare benefits feeding insects to animals might provide against the harms to the insects.
WATTPoultry, a poultry industry news site, published an opinion piece that mentions that questions about animal welfare on insect farms came up at a recent industry conference in Europe.
In Defence of Animals, an animal rights organization, published an article arguing against the development of insect factory farms.
The Telegraph profiled Antoine Hubert, founder of Ynsect.
Invertebrate Sentience
A new paper that has been accepted in iScience studied pain response in octopi, and the author, Dr. Robyn Crook, argues that the study demonstrates affective pain experience in the animals.
The study, which exposed octopi to painful stimuli, found that they consistently: “avoided contexts in which pain was experienced, preferred a location in which they experienced relief from pain, and showed no conditioned preference in the absence of pain.”
They also found that animals groomed the injection sites of the acetic acid used in the study, but did not groom if local anesthetic was used.
Phys.org published a new article on Dr. Jonathan Birch and the ASENT project at the London School of Economics, which works on developing a conceptual framework for studying animal sentience and advancing progress on some unresolved questions in the space.
Notably, ASENT might begin trying to study sentience in bees, including studying whether or not bees can be conditioned to make associations between temporarily distant events.
The animal advocacy organization Animal Ethics released an illustrated physiology of the nervous systems of invertebrates.
The report discusses the basics of invertebrate nervous systems and the immense variation in nervous systems between taxonomic groups of invertebrates.
Miscellaneous
In a high profile use of biological control insects, parasitic wasps have been released en masse into a British mansion to tackle a large population of moths that are consuming furniture and clothing.
The wasps will lay eggs inside the larvae or eggs of the moths, killing off the moth population.
The mansion believes this is the first such application of biological control wasps in an indoor setting for historical conservation purposes.
A new German law restricting the use of pesticides to combat terrestrial insect population declines is facing protests from farmers, who see the law as putting an economic burden on their industry.
In the Florida Keys, protests have begun against Oxitech’s project to release genetically modified mosquitoes to curb the local mosquito population using the sterile insect technique.