為了讓這種蟲子便宜又好吃，科學家讓它們長胖了一倍……

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[聽力原文]

Edible Insect Breeding Led to Larger but Not Necessarily Better Larvae

A pound of chicken willset you backa couple bucks.Ground beef, maybe three to four dollars a pound. But a pound of protein-rich driedmealwormscould costtwiceas much.

"The price per pound of mealworms is still relatively expensive." Juan A. Morales-Ramos is a researchentomologistwith the USDA in Stoneville, Mississippi. But he says that cost might be coming down.

For eight years, he and his team have selectively bred mealworms, which are the larvae of a type ofdarkling beetle. Their goal was to breed larger and larger worms - and they succeeded in nearly doubling the size of the larvae. But doubling up came with an evolutionary tradeoff: larger larvae had fewer eggs, and their offspring weren"t as hardy as the ancestral strain.

Still, generations are shorter in the worm world—meaning…[read more]

新育種麵包蟲：更大卻更弱

一斤雞肉要花十幾塊錢，一斤牛絞肉大概是二三十塊錢（國內可能比較貴），但一斤富含蛋白質的干黃粉蟲（mealworm，俗稱麵包蟲）的價格卻是前者的兩倍（國內可能比較便宜）。

「一斤麵包蟲的價格還是比較高昂的。」胡安·A·莫拉萊斯-拉莫斯（Juan A. Morales-Ramos）說，他是密西西比州斯通維爾美國農業部（USDA in Stoneville, Mississippi）的一名昆蟲學家。然而，據他所說，這一價格將會回落。

八年來，他的團隊一直致力於選擇性培育麵包蟲——一種擬步行甲蟲（darkling beetle）的幼蟲。他們的目標是培育出越來越大的蟲子；現在，他們成功選育出了體積幾乎兩倍大的幼蟲。但加倍的體積帶來了進化的代價：越大的幼蟲產卵越少，其後代越不如祖先強壯。

儘管如此，在線蟲的世界裡每一代生命持續較短，這意味著……[更多]

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